Foreign in a Long Familiar Leap Year

<p><em>Foreign in a Long-Familiar Leap Year</em> is a luminous debut poetry collection by Salmah Salam Oiza that traces the twelve months of a life uprooted and replanted abroad. Written as a calendar of longing the poems move through airports rented rooms prayer mats and phone calls across oceans asking what it means to belong when home is both everywhere and nowhere.</p><p></p><p>Each poem is a timestamp - January as a one-way ticket February cold cold loneliness July when nobody texts back December without snow. Together they create a momentum of yearning: for God for love for language for the familiar touch of a season that no longer arrives.</p><p></p><p>With wit intimacy and lyrical force Salam captures the contradictions of migration: gratitude and grief distance and closeness solitude and communion. Foreign in a Long-Familiar Leap Year refuses the trauma-only narrative of diaspora literature offering instead a manual of faith and tenderness in a year that will not be forgotten.</p><p></p><p>For readers of contemporary African poetry lovers of Warsan Shire Safia Elhillo and Kaveh Akbar this collection is an affirmation that longing itself can be a home.</p>