Omar Sakr and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Queer Use, Cynicism, and Falling in Love

This week, new host Cindy Juyoung Ok speaks with Omar Sakr, who joins us from Sydney, Australia. Sakr tends to the in between, writing prose and poetry, and moving between poetic and political urges, and through queerness and diasporic experience. On this episode, we spend time with a series from Sakr’s newest collection, Non-Essential Work (UQP, 2023). The series, “On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s ‘Inferno,’” reflects on and challenges Canto XXVIII, in which Dante comes upon the Prophet in the eighth level of hell. You can read three poems from the series in the June 2023 issue of Poetry. We also continue our new segment, in which guests answer a question from the void, and the episode ends with a surprise visitor.