Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Shelf Life
By Hemat Malak
5Islands Press
ISBN : 9781923248274, August 2026, Paperback
Hemat Malak’s debut collection Shelf Life has the feel and progression of memoir, taking on the contours of a series of key life events and moving from childhood to maturity, but fully utilises the tools of poetry, combining a strong understanding of form, sound, with apt metaphor and the ability to condense emotive intensity into just the right word. The collection is structured into six sections, and explores such things as migration, the mother-daughter relationship, a failed marriage, racism, grief, motherhood, anxiety, the female body and aging. The book opens in Egypt with “My Mother Walks Me to School”. There is a beautiful rhythm in this poem created through structure and sound as a young girl walks to school against a caravan of camels in the desert. The staggered structure is one that Malak uses regularly throughout the book providing movement, motion, and a sense of urgency. In this poem there is additional tension provided by an abusive father looming in the background:
She dusts me down at the gate
and kisses my head—
she is a nile fish,
a rusty hook
through her top lip.
She adjusts my sister, then
hurries back
before father returns.
Though this poem is delicate in its delivery, it is the perfect opener, introducing many of the characters who recur primarily in this section but also in other parts of the book. There is the malevolent father who exists both in terms of his direct relationship with the mother and daughter but also as representative of the narcissism and violence that the family have attempted to escape through migration. A poem addressed to him titled “Wish you were here hell, no” takes the form of a letter to the poet’s deceased father, complete with line down the page and instructions to “hand deliver only”:
father, what were you feeding, stuffing yourself
With other people’s things?
Never mind.
I doubt we’ll meet again.
There is the vulnerable mother whose superstitions and pain become part of the book’s transitions: what is carried and what must be shed:
My mother (though she’s good at math) fears the number Four—
a dread bestowed on her by Kim, her friend from Vietnam, Tetraphobia.
leaping from the Asian world, roams lost thorugh Mum’s born-in-Egypt
brain, jostling for room among bloated superstitions of warding off a hex
with an evil-eye medallion, keeping shoes right-side-up to not offend the gods,
and ensuring peace in families by storing scissors closed. (“How Crossed Scissors Cut”)
Other sections explore the impact of a failed marriage, single parenthood, love and grief, self-sufficiency, aging, racial tension, faith and self-discovery.Throughout the book, Malak uses poetic form adeptly, guiding the reading visually with sensory details and use of white space along with sonic elements like rhythm, repetition and occasionally some off-rhyme in concrete poems, villanelle, pantoum, haiku, ghazal and haibun, a form Malak uses particularly well, as in the extended piece “When It Ended at Number 17”, allowing the mixture of specific storytelling prose to mingle with the sparse Japanese haiku to create a sense of finality and transition in the wake of a failed marriage:
I was like a mad woman with a deadline to find
every lost smile, all the while picturing his glare at
my wastefulness. I don’t know why aesthetics meant
survival to me then and why I needed to hurry.
after the ice
the earth spends her pennies
on blossoms and green
Many of the poems in Shelf Life are subtly funny, their humour woven into the pathos of the poem. This happens throughout the book, from a single mother’s four am wake up, dancing naked to jazz and cats, ticking the box on a website to verify that one is a human (“made me want to yell/about my marriage,”), an advertisement for an old car full of the detritus of a life, a letter to one’s avatar, or in another of Malak’s haibun about cluttered thoughts and the creative process:
Maybe my sister or daughter will send an intervention
plea to the Marie Kondo show and she’ll come all the
way to Australia to save me. Her cherry-blossom voice
will ask me to hold each notion, turn it to catch the
light and see if it brings me joy. She’ll guide me to fill
baskets destined for people in need of more thoughts.
Even those worn-at-the-elbow ideas are useful to
someone, she’ll say. Then she’ll show me how to fold
what remains into little rectangles which will fit into
just one drawer in the right hemisphere of my brain,
and I’ll hug her and promise to keep my head clear. (“Thicket and Sieve”)
Many of the poems in the latter half of the book are about racism, misogyny, the changing female body, and aging – how we judge and are judged:
You take a bite from my flesh
as I hurry past. I want to turn,
grab your head gently,
pry your mouth wide open
and whisper a spell
into your depths to make
your insides release
and come unfolding out, (“You Bite, I Swallow”)
Shelf Life is a finely written book, so polished and confident in its voice that it’s difficult to believe it’s Hemat Malak’s first collection. The work balances a self-reflection that feels very human and open with a wry expansiveness that isn’t afraid to laugh, cry, or reinvent itself.