I Who Have Always Felt Words (Central Avenue Books, 2027). A poetry collection shaped by inheritance, faith, and the radical act of thriving amid hardship. Moving through the four temperaments, Shams Alkamil crafts a lyric architecture that holds Sudanese identity, familial lineage, political violence, spirituality, and the pursuit of compassion in delicate tension.

Praise for I Who Have Always Felt Words

“I read this collection through tears of recognition, of nostalgia, of grief, of joy. Alkamil writes of the Sudanese diaspora experience in this moment with stunning, aching precision, and with a firm, profound hope that we have a future, we are here, we are worthy, we are loved. Even if only by ourselves, we are loved.” — Yassmin Abdel-Magied, author of At Sea

“In Shams Alkamil’s I Who Have Always Felt Words, words are alive. Language has many lives and afterlives—it lingers between the living and the dead, between prayer, protest, and curse. In this formally inventive, restless collection, Alkamil moves between essayistic gestures, anaphoric incantations, and lyric self-portraiture as she maps the entanglements of the spiritual, the speculative, the political, and the ungodly. Tethered to a grieving Sudan, I Who Have Always Felt Words is an essential, arresting collection that insists “this broken world,” where “sorrow embroiders the walls,” is not beyond revival.” — Sara Elkamel, author of Field of No Justice and Garden City Sea