To philosophize or to affectivize, that is the question of Mina Malik’s debut poetry collection Rogue Planet. And the answer lies in her ability to create a work that does both – weaving high philosophy into an emotional undertow that submerges the reader in its depths – and crafts a patchwork of introspection on love, loss, and whimsy. Across the collection’s fifteen poems, Malik navigates the collision between hyper-intellectual distance and raw, domestic vulnerability, examining how romantic ideals collapse under the weight of everyday life. Her poem ‘After Juliet’ is perhaps the piece that aptly navigates the thematic narrative direction of Malik’s collection. She wants to dismantle the whimsy that is often promised as an accompaniment to romance. What Malik tries to deconstruct is the marketing strategy of love and relationships, but she does it in a way that calls upon and borrows from mythology and science, and combines it with individual affect in a manner that is both impressive and an incredibly hard feat to achieve.

Malik writes from a self split into two forms: the immaculate wit of an intellectual – detached and observant – and the figure of Andromeda. We meet her first in the opening poem ‘The Andromeda Paradox,’ where she is bound to a sea-swept rock, hyperaware of the spectacle being made of her agony. Malik revisits Andromeda’s rescue by Perseus – a myth infused with chivalry and romance – only to make an abrupt shift in her poem ‘After Juliet’ to “the children fighting” and “wiping chocolate on…sheets”. This transition is quite jarring, but that is precisely the point. We’re taken from promises of unrealistic companionship to the sudden change in imagery of a couple defrosting a deep freezer. We’re made to visualize exactly this: a beloved character – the protagonist of a myth – plucked out of her beautiful story of monsters and her lover-savior Perseus (who would protect her no matter what), shot through a wormhole, across timelines and thrown in front of a freezer, holding a pick while the ice blocks slowly loosen and tip down toward the bottom.

What makes this work across the collection is Malik’s relentless refusal to allow domestic mundane reality to hide behind literary grandiosity. She builds up high-minded frameworks – astrophysics, classical literature, Renaissance astronomy – only to violently crash them into gritty, unglamorous truths. In ‘After Juliet,’ while the speaker despairs over outgrowing her youthful loveliness, the elevated tragedy of Shakespeare is immediately punctuated by the absurdly banal reality that “the moon is watching cricket.” Similarly, in ‘Astronaut is puzzled,’ Malik constructs a sterile, calculated formula for romantic success – mapping out coordinates, park rounds, and mathematical equations on a graph – only to shatter the calculation when the satellite catapults into the stratosphere “screaming like a cartoon sidekick.” In ‘Inventory,’ she uses the clinical format of a ledger (“2 pens: 1 fountain, 1 ballpoint”, “3 homes, in the same lane”) to itemize the slow breakdown of a fifteen-year marriage. These sudden stylistic shifts work because they mimic the actual rupture of heartbreak: the sudden, absurd realization that life’s grandest emotional promises often resolve into dirty laundry and empty silence.

Malik continues to stay out of the lull of an idealized life by turning her sharp eye toward the labor of love and the quiet erosion of self in a marriage. In the poem ‘Storage,’ she writes about a “dutiful goblin guarding your riches”: The romantic protagonist has unraveled into a goblin sorting through grimy hoardings, marking the beginning of the end of love. Malik’s poem ‘The End of Love’ connects personhood to love itself: “It stands in the corner” as “things begin to grow holes.”

Drawing deeply from the cultural vernacular of endurance, Malik dissecting how women are taught to accept quiet degradation under the guise of gratitude. The cultural demand to endure is alien in its cruelty yet familiar in its ordinariness; it hovers above you like a dark cloud, ready to open its mouth and rain down terror. When love becomes a stranger, Malik’s poetry does not look away; it turns hard-hitting and unshy, exposing the ugliness outside the brochure of romance. In ‘sabr, shukar,’ the long list of what could be worse than falling out of love in a relationship  – “beating, cheating,…acid” – is held up as a mirror to society.

Yet Rogue Planet is not merely an obituary for romantic disillusionment. It is an exploration of survival mechanisms. Malik frequently shifts registers from quiet grief to sharp, self-protective armor. ‘smoke/mirrors’ contains a speaker who observes her partner as a “doppelgänger” through a “scorched sideway”. The speaker’s curiosity becomes “scientific” as a way to cushion the blow of alienation. ‘Whetstone’ shows emotional distance hardening into physical defense, where the speaker embraces a “sideways blade” body with “bone-knives” to ward off further damage. Malik employs the tactic of a fluidity of persona in her poems to move seamlessly between vulnerability and agency, demonstrating that self-preservation often requires wearing different mythic masks or calculated intellectual personae.

But the collection offers a unique assertion of individual power, woven into her borrowing from mythology. In the poem ‘Circe,’ the sorceress stands as a feminine expression of “untamed powers.” Rather than succumbing to rejection, Circe reclaims her autonomy by deciding to “keep your pearls” and embracing her own desires. Here, Malik locates hope not in rescue, but in self-reclamation.

To philosophize or to affectivize – in the end, Malik refuses to choose. And that refusal is her collection’s radical power. Rogue Planet sustains the tension between intellect and emotion. Malik’s debut poetry collection is as intellectually rigorous as it is emotionally resonant – a rogue planet, untethered from expectation, burning with its own strange light.