Non-Essential Work (Omar Sakr, UQP)

Omar Sakr’s work is polished to a razor-sharp point in his third poetry collection. As expected, Non-Essential Work contends with notions around identities outside the white and heteronormative. But rather than grappling with these questions, Sakr makes the reader feel guided, as if the author already knows the answers and is trying to impart the knowledge he has found. This creates a sense of authorial confidence that is constantly present, despite the collection’s recurrent themes of cycling doubt, systemic bigotry and defiant love. In Non-Essential Work, Sakr demonstrates a sophisticated use of the poetic form, and some of the work, such as the unbroken stream-of-consciousness poems, can appear to be inaccessible. However, upon deeper reading, these poems seem written to cycle back on themselves, illustrating how a single idea can have limitless nuance. In his use of stanzas, Sakr forces incongruent ideas or ideologies together to find new meaning, as in the devastating ‘A Song of Love’, where ‘about a boy, on the other side of the ocean/all of eight years of age, and unknown years of love’ precedes ‘whose parents tortured him for days…’ Those familiar with Sakr’s The Lost Arabs will find that much of his rawness has been honed to something more acute. Non-Essential Work holds its own alongside the poetry of writers like Quinn Eades and Richard Siken.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Freelancer Christian Alphonso works as an industry journalist. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews