salmah salam press

Foreign in a Long-Familiar Leap Year is a luminous debut poetry collection by Salmah Salam Oiza that traces the twelve months of a life uprooted and replanted abroad. Written as a calendar of longing, the poems move through airports, rented rooms, prayer mats, and phone calls across oceans, asking what it means to belong when ＂home＂ is both everywhere and nowhere.

Each poem is a timestamp - January as a one-way ticket, February cold cold loneliness, July when nobody texts back, December without snow. Together, they create a momentum of yearning: for God, for love, for language, for the familiar touch of a season that no longer arrives.

With wit, intimacy, and lyrical force, Salam captures the contradictions of migration: gratitude and grief, distance and closeness, solitude and communion. Foreign in a Long-Familiar Leap Year refuses the trauma-only narrative of diaspora literature, offering instead a manual of faith, and tenderness in a year that will not be forgotten.

For readers of contemporary African poetry, lovers of Warsan Shire, Safia Elhillo, and Kaveh Akbar, this collection is an affirmation that longing itself can be a home.