INTERVIEW
Collapsing Time
Farah Ghafoor on Her Debut Collection
Farah Ghafoor describes herself as a poet dedicated to the truth. She is the author of Shadow Price, which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award and the 2026 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, as well as longlisted for the 2025 Toronto Book Awards. It’s also been named a CBC Best Book of 2025.
Poet and Rawanee founder Muniba Mahmud spoke with Farah Ghafoor about her debut collection, the work of staying true to one’s convictions, and collapsing timelines in poetry.
The following conversation took place online and has been edited for clarity.
MUNIBA MAHMUD: Who is the writer behind the work? Who is Farah Ghafoor really?
FARAH GHAFOOR: I’m a poet who specializes in writing about topics that, I suppose, aren’t considered very literary or poetic. I have a background in financial accounting, so that’s something I bring to a lot of my work. It’s the foundation I think from. So, to take it back a little further, I was born in the States and then I grew up in Canada, and I studied Accounting at the University of Toronto. There, I was taking a class called the Economics of Healthcare. During that course, I learned about this term “shadow price.” And in that context, it related to the shadow price of a life – how much a human life would be worth in dollars. And this is varied by country. Seeing that concept explained in context sort of brought together everything that I’d been thinking about for a long time, like about the valuation of things that should not be valuated. Like, human lives, and the world as we live in it, which is utterly priceless, I think. And so that sort of became a jumping-off point for this book and allowed me to further pursue themes of time, themes of colonization, and themes of how economics sort of builds this structure of life that we live in, in this society.
MM: The fact that your work is being recognized for awards means that people understand what you’re trying to do. How do you feel about that, about writing with purpose and also, you know, about the audience receiving it the way you intended?
FG: Yeah, it’s incredibly validating to be recognized for my ideas and my craft, because I wasn’t really sure who would be interested in reading my work, because it’s not…it’s not super positive, and it’s based in reality. And people take to the page as sort of an escape sometimes. So I was hoping that anybody would read my work, really. So to be a finalist for so many awards, it’s incredibly gratifying, to see that people in the literary scene in Canada are recognizing the importance of how climate change impacts all of our lives.
MM: Your book’s title Shadow Price speaks to the concept of there being no market price [on some things]. So you’ve taken an economics term, an evaluation concept from your own work as a financial analyst, and you’re resisting the system with it. What does it mean to spend your days putting prices on things, and your nights writing about things that cannot be priced?
FG: Now it seems like I’m a bit of a hypocrite, actually, once it’s phrased that way.
MM: It’s called balance.
FG: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the field that I work in is internal financial management, and so I’m not really putting a price on things that shouldn’t be priced. That’s other people in other fields who can be sort of blamed for that sort of thing. But I think it’s incredibly grounding actually to have a career in accounting, where accountants are said to know the language of business, and that’s always been something I’m incredibly interested in. And as I was writing this book, I found that I could approach these concepts and sort of guess at the itemization of our world with a with a perspective that I think is grounded in reality and in the reality of the capitalism in which we all live.
MM: And I think that’s beautiful, right? I don’t think it’s hypocrisy, and I really didn’t intend it to come across as that.
FG: No, it’s ok.
MM: But I understand that, you know, when you’re a writer navigating the real world, navigating your profession, with a comprehension of the economics of things. You naturally question from an informed place. And you can also challenge things that need to be challenged – and obviously not everything does – but, where it’s relevant, it’s good to have that ability. So, just coming back to the point about challenging, you’re furious – as it comes across from your poetry – about a planet that is in crisis. You write of the dark reality of climate change. Your poems are time travelers. You reference a past of capitalism – well, a present, actually – of colonialism, of extraction from economies. You write in a contemporary form, eco-poetry with present-day urgency. What has your journey been through life that has led to this? Where does the writing come from, and what is it blending?
FG: Really, this journey and this understanding of time came from this book that I read called Time and Water by Andri Stare Magnusson, who’s an Icelandic author who writes deeply about climate change. He talked about how the climate crisis, could be measured in water and time. And that came to me during a time when I was very much grasping for any kind of metaphor or any kind of solid understanding of the climate crisis, because it felt so urgent, and it was so anxiety-inducing that I was losing sleep over it. There’s this one key metaphor that he uses in his book – he talks about his grandmother and his daughter sitting at the dining table, and he asks his daughter to calculate when his grandmother was born and when his daughter would maybe pass away, given expected lifetimes. And that spanned hundreds of years, and that allowed me to sort of place a touchstone in the future and in the past. For when I or people of my generation might pass away, for instance. Once you start to look at, for example, 2070, 2080, we all want to be living good lives at that point. And so, for me, that journey of time through the book really began with asking myself, “How can I communicate that?” We all want to thrive by that point in time. And we all want our children to thrive, and our grandchildren. So that was really the foundation upon which I started to think about time, and explore that through different vectors.
I started to go back into the past through the poem called ‘The Plot,’ where I was exploring how colonization essentially expedited the climate crisis in a massive, in a very substantial way. And, I was also looking at – and continue to look into – the future, for how do we treat the future, and how do we treat the past when we talk about it, and what we prioritize through our daily actions, as well as through our politics.
MM: You speak so much about time, the concept of time, and you’ve shared [that] in your work. I noticed a few places where you did use the grandmother-granddaughter reference in your poetry as well. In one of your poems you’ve written “that poem ages with me”. It’s almost like [the idea of] care is also making young people grow old before their time, at least the way I understood it. You’re measuring time [down] to the millisecond between centuries, so it’s quite paradoxical – there is a rush, and yet, things have not changed over time. The past is still wakeful, it’s still impacting us. The future is a tightrope, there is a sense of foreboding [about it]. And you make references to slavery and to the glorified way in which we look at the empire. What is your understanding of time? When you explore the themes that you’re speaking of, particularly in terms of climate change, the urgency [of it], the impacts of the past and the present have on it.
FG: I guess I think about time as sort of a scale – on one side is the future and on the other side is the past. And I think it’s equally important to make present-day decisions based on both the future and the past equally. We have a very myopic understanding of the climate crisis and of time. There’s only so much we can do. We make five-year plans, we make ten-year plans, but we don’t really think further than that because I’m sure that people don’t want to, it’s a hard thing to think about. We plan for our retirements, but we don’t know what the world is going to look like when we retire. I was trying to bring that perspective and that introspection across through a series, through many poems throughout the book. And I wanted the reader to start to think about time differently as something that is both controlled by our leaders in terms of their decisions and their perspectives, as well as by ourselves and how we live every day and how we approach decisions for the future and how we consider the past. So these were like touchstones in the book – key factors – that are related to time. I was hoping to bring something new to the reader, a new perspective, that they could consider and understand as we continue to live our lives every day. Because it’s difficult, I think, for the younger – for at least my generation – because there’s a sense of doomism and of anxiety, and it’s not really going away.
MM: You’re absolutely right, and I think I sense it when I read your work, that sense of anxiety. You’ve spoken about money – there’s a price put on things that cannot be priced. In your poetry, you reference the shortened life of a tree, and then you come to the last poet in the world, which is a quite foreboding. Read those words really makes one feel that urgency and anxiety. Moving alongside the progression in your work, tracing the steps of slavery, colonialism, and on to the last poet in the world, showing how steep the decline is, really, that descent – was that journey in your poetry and in the way you presented your work deliberate? And what do want the reader to feel when they’re journeying through your work and arriving at the end of it in this way?
FG: The sequencing and placement of the different sections were deliberate. I did start out with these perspectives of time to give the reader a foundation and a sense of a frame of reference for how I’m going to be continuing to approach the climate crisis. And next was the elegy portion, which was the poet at the end of the world. I placed that as the second section, because it felt like a sort of natural progression of acknowledging the reader’s anxiety their sense of grief over the world. And then I talk about ‘The Plot,’ and that’s when I get into the more intellectual research portion, and I’m like, “Okay, well, why do you feel like this? Why does it feel like everything’s going to end?” The thing is, there are very clear culprits of these terrible feelings that you’re feeling, all this grief and this doomism. You can put names and addresses [to the culprits] actually, and, that is something that ‘The Plot’ explores. And as the book goes on, we kind of return to that sense, to that perspective of beauty at the end with the garden. And we talk about how to take care of the world and to sort of be in it, that’s also a key perspective of taking a stance against climate change and being present and taking care of the world around you. Because this is a world that we’re all sharing. It is sort of a community garden. This is a place where we all want to live for a long time and [where] we want our loved ones to feel safe and happy. And so, yeah, you’ll notice that the book ends on a poem about grief, but that poem ends with the line, “we will all be together” and that’s the sense of hope that I wanted to leave the reader with. I was trying to manage the readers’ emotions throughout the book. And I wanted it to feel like a more natural progression if they read the book in one sitting.
MM: That’s beautifully said. I want to ask you a little bit about your creative process. We’ve discussed what it is that you’re trying to do with your work, what you are trying to warn people about. In terms of your work, you mentioned extensive research, and you’re naturally well-informed, about how world markets operate, how the world runs. There is urgency in your poetry, and facts. There is also a lot of emotion. There is deep pain. You write, at one point, “my heart, soundless as a plague” – that’s very impactful. Blending all of this together, talk a little bit through your creative process.
FG: I guess the creative process sort of varied by section in this book, when I was writing the shorter poems that are spread throughout the sections called ‘TIME’ and ‘THE GARDEN,’ and even in ‘THE LAST POET IN THE WORLD’ section. As a writer, I’m always collecting facts and doing research into things I find interesting. For example, in the poem ‘The Dream Eaters,’ there is a line about how wasps eat their masterpiece. I think I’d seen that in a BBC Earth documentary. I thought it was so fascinating, and I looked more into it. So, on a smaller scale, I’m always collecting information that I find interesting and which might be beneficial for my poetry. However, I don’t always put everything in. I have this one big document where I collect everything and just sort of hope that I might I might use it at some later point.
For ‘The Plot’ I had a very specific goal, and that was to answer my own questions about how the climate crisis came to be. So as I wrote [the poem] I felt like I was answering a series of questions: Who owns the land? Who has the right to live on it? What exactly is a pest? How does that [definition] apply to how people live today in how they are treated? How were they – pests and people – treated historically when it was said they didn’t belong there [in a place]? And I’m thinking all the time about what the world is going to look like for people who live in South Asia, especially Pakistan and India. How are they going to be impacted?
So I had a very deliberate focus for that long poem, because I had my own questions to answer. And the thing is, I know other people have the same questions that they need to find answers for, for their own understanding of the climate crisis.
MM: It’s great when you talk about audience, because naturally, when you were writing your book you had your own feelings, but you were trying to stir something within the audience, a mix of emotion and comprehension.
You’ve also had moments where you’re directly interacting with an audience. Your work has been featured in a number of exhibitions, one of them being Who’s Afraid of Labor Justice? and the other one Structural Integrity. Talk a little bit about the exhibitions, about what they are trying to achieve, and about the work you’ve shared in them, what your creative process has been for that. And what has the audience’s response been like when you’re actually meeting them and seeing how they’re responding [to your work] in real time.
FG: For both of those exhibitions, I was asked to write a poem based on a social justice theme. The first poem was on labor justice. The second one was a concept I had come up with, about how the structures and architecture of our society reflect our society’s intentions, and what we value in both of them. The thing is, I don’t really do commissions unless I’m already interested in the idea. I was already interested in the role of labor in our values and the way we live our lives. And for the Structural Integrity exhibition, I was already interested in the housing crisis in Canada. So, since I’m writing these poems for public audiences, I try to make sure that my work is accessible. And I’ve found that narrative poems are particularly successful because people are used to hearing stories. For audiences that don’t usually read poetry, this might be a good starting point. This is a way, I believe, to get poetry out to more people. As I was talking to the people who visited the exhibitions, I found that not only did they like it [the poetry], they understood it, and to me that’s the most important role of poetry – to help people understand things that they don’t conceive on their own, to bring new concepts to new audiences. In that way, I guess poetry is a source of both truth and experimentation.
MM: That’s beautifully answered. And I love your approach – thinking about what would actually work with the audience, because you’re a writer working with purpose and if your poems remain too abstract, who’s going to actually understand what you’re trying to make people understand?
You’re almost writing resistance poetry. I think, being a South Asian writer, you come from a tradition of resistance poetry. A lot of writers working in the areas of human rights and climate justice tell me that they have been under a lot of pressure over the years to not write to those themes, or any kind of resistance poetry, but to write about birds and trees and so on. Naturally, writing about the climate is a form of resistance, right? Because we’re losing those things as we speak. Tell me more about how do you find the will to write resistance poetry, if you ever face any pushback, and how you counter that.
FG: Hmm. I think that as long as I have resistance towards the our capitalist systems, I will always have the compulsion to write resistance poetry. I guess in my work I’ve been lucky to have not faced significant resistance from the outside, I suppose because I try to talk about beauty within my work, like the birds and the trees. For a long time, I was either writing poems about beauty, or I was writing poems about maybe my nihilism, very early on. But during my writing journey with nihilism about the climate crisis, I found that beauty is a great tool to convince people about anything. People want to protect the world because they find it beautiful, which is not exactly my perspective because I believe that the world has the right to exist as it is even if it’s not beautiful. But for audiences toward whom I’m writing, I find it important to highlight the beauty, if they don’t agree with my perspective of protecting the world as it is and not only because it’s beautiful, and because oh, the place you grew up in is beautiful and the parks you visit and the places you take your vacations at, they’re all so beautiful, why don’t you come? So I find that in order to counter any kind of resistance, I need to remind people of what they find important and what they already value. Because the thing is, I can’t change anybody’s values. I can do my best to convince them to see things the way I do, but at the end of the day connecting with people on terms they already value is the most effective way towards change.
MM: You’ve spoken about keeping hope alive in your writing. You speak about urgency, and about the worst case scenarios, but you do end with hope. As a young writer growing up in this world in this time, in a generation that has watched the world systems collapse in front of them – we’ve seen climate incidents over the last many years, particularly increasing in the last couple of years – what does it mean to hold on to hope? How do you do that?
FG: I think without hope nobody really has a reason to live, which is not, I guess, the best perspective. However, people have been through wars and genocide, all throughout history, and the thing is, hope is absolutely necessary. And it’s not just like, oh, I have hope; it’s really resilience, really, against your own feelings of nihilism and against nihilism and doomism in the people around you. The sense of hope is maintained through action, such as volunteering and really participating in the world around you. It’s about voting, and participating in elections and talking to the people around you about the climate crisis and why it’s important to them and to yourself. Maintaining hope is not only about staying within your own feelings. Instead, an important aspect of it is reaching out towards the people around you.
MM: As a writer who’s deliberately writing with a lot of awareness of the world, I imagine you must have had your own childhood experiences that made you know about things, that made you take to writing, that made you take to research. Something has blended this knowledge of finance and poetry in you. And I think it’s really important to be interdisciplinary, bring those awarenesses together, when we talk about important subjects. Otherwise, often the conversation is not as well-informed and not as valid, right? What were your influences, when you were growing up or later in life, that have turned you into the kind of writer that you are today?
FG: I think there are a few experiences that have sort of made me the writer I am today. One of them is that my mom used to take me and my siblings to the library every week. That’s where I gained my real appreciation for literature, I believe, instead of, being on an iPad or gaming. I suppose that’s where I learned the beauty of storytelling and of being in worlds other than your own. And later on as a teenager, my older sister had a huge impact on me, in 2014 or so. It was called social justice, and it was a little bit cringe, but she was always very outspoken and an advocate for change and for changing perspectives. And those two influences, I believe, help me be more critical, see the world in a different way, and really question the things I’m seeing. Later, during my undergraduate degree, I was able to take those perspectives of of storytelling and of maintaining a critical mindset toward my own studies, as well as toward the world around me when I would, for example, stumble upon a TikTok or a reel. And I would research things that are interesting to me, that might eventually make their way into my work. I believe those helped me become who I am today.
MM: That’s lovely to hear. And I love that routine of just going to the library every weekend. It’s not just the kind of material you get to consume; it’s that habit of reading and thinking and slowing down. Having come this far, where do you want to see your poetry? The impact of the writing that you’re doing, where would you like to see it go ideally in the next few years?
FG: I’m actually working on my second book, and in it I’m hoping to delve a little further into economics and how national – and even local – economic systems make an impact on our daily lives. It will still be connected to climate change, but I’m also hoping to take things a little further than I did in this book.
Muniba Mahmud is a writer, poet, curator and performer with very big feelings about social justice, identity, heritage and spirituality. She functions as the mad engine driver behind the global-majority creative and literary arts platform Rawanee, where she channels her passion for giving voice to those of value and those less heard.
Where story meets strategy, she also wears marketer and founder hats, building across industries and global markets. A Faber Academy and Columbia University alumna, she remains an ever-interested student of life, and writes as Moon/>eam (Moonbeam).
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