Shadow Price
House of Anansi | April 1st, 2025
Borrowing its title from a finance term – "the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists" – Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens.
What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor's arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that “climate change denial” first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime.
Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast.
Excerpts & Recognition
- Excerpt of Shadow Price | Winner of the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, awarded by George Elliott Clarke & Committee from the University of Toronto
- The Pear; Larvae; New Year, New Me | Longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize | Read Excerpt Here
- Self Portrait with Polar Bears | Winner of the Hart House Literary Contest | Read Here
- End of the World Poem (The Dream-Eaters) | Finalist for Far Horizons Award for Poetry, The Malahat Review
- Here, Grass | Honourable Mention for Arts and Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award | Read Here
- Evolution | The Offing | Forthcoming
- Shadow Price; The Subject | Brick | Forthcoming
- Departure for Noah's Ark | Augur | Read Here
- Equality (Mercy) | The Walrus | Read Here
- Birthday Poem | Canthius | Read Here
- The Jungle Book: Epilogue | The Seventh Wave | Read Here
- Oryx | AHVAZ // AAVAZ // AVAAZ: A Chapbook Anthology of South Asian Poetry, League of Canadian Poets | Read Here
Praise
"With ardor and a lustrous fury, Farah Ghafoor emboldens with poems that resound of a planet in crisis, from sky to the deep sea, from manmade to the natural world, from time perished to time still coming. Through poems grounded in research alongside the lament of a climate in decay, Ghafoor wields a deft lyric voice that cuts through to the truth of the dark that remains ahead. Here lies an environment imperiled by a society rooted in the evils of empire, in the capitalist greed to see all things only through its monetary worth. This is a book we need now more than ever given the severe and precarious state of our entire existence and all that we touch, eat, breathe, and leave behind." -- Mai Der Vang, author of YELLOW RAIN (Graywolf Press, 2021)
"In this profound and engrossing debut, Farah Ghafoor explores the impacts of capitalism, colonialism, and extrativicism on human and multispecies worlds. Through eco-speculative, mythopoetic, satirical, and documentary modes, these poems rewild narrative to help us plot our entanglements in the Anthropocene. If we are the last poets, may this collection inspire us to truly value the pricelessness of our wounded and wondrous planet." -- Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory [åmot] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2023)
"Farah Ghafoor’s highly-anticipated debut is as expansive and epic as it is exacting. Connected to the economic and devoted to the ecological, Shadow Price presents poems as interested in colonialism as they are ant colonies. A master of the long form, glacial in pace and scope, Ghafoor examines the world we live in with a molecular and unflinching eye. With a forensic tone, this collection turns towards climate grief with devastating precision, counting birds like coins and snails like children. Ghafoor is the poet here as much as researcher, observer and analyst, guiding readers through landscapes like the highways of Ontario and the logging forests of India. Refusing comfort and prioritizing the dignity of a complete elegy, Shadow Price dismantles the linearity of time and decenters the human perspective to provide a codex of description as specific and detailed of life itself. For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin and Solmaz Sharif, Ghafoor’s poignant, political debut is rife with sentences that twist like tree roots and sharpen like claws. Shadow Price is a stalwart reminder of how much we have already lost to capitalism, how much we still might lose, and how we might come to terms with this disrepair." -- Sanna Wani, author of My Grief, the Sun (House of Anansi, 2022)
"Ghafoor is a natural storyteller, and her lyrics offer the temperament of the ancient seer, able to discern what is long behind and ahead, all that is hidden and all that is obvious; what others simply refuse to see, if only they’d listen... This is an absolutely solid debut." -- rob mclennan
Press
Publisher's Weekly Spring 2025 Fiction & Nonfiction Preview: Poetry
49th Shelf Most Anticipated: Our 2025 Spring Poetry Preview
Reviews
rob mclennan's blog
Interviews
Poet & financial analyst Farah Ghafoor talks about climate change, capitalism, & complicity! | Tightwires
Climate Action, Identity Politics, and CanLit Aesthetics: An Interview with Farah Ghafoor | Room Magazine
Endnote S2 E7: Next Generation 3 w/ Farah Ghafoor | Hart House Student Literary and Library Committee, University of Toronto Hart House
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Currently booking 2025 interviews and events (poetry readings, keynote speeches, craft lectures, classroom Q&As, etc.).
ARC requests and other publicity inquiries can also be directed to House of Anansi via [email protected]. |
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