Prolonged Thoughts

In Prolonged Thoughts, Muaz Sharif maps the landscape of obsessive emotion, those thoughts that loop endlessly, refuse departure, and settle permanently in the mind. The collection spans 103 poems of varying forms and registers: intimate midnight scenes, declarations of devotion, theological meditations, existential darkness, and brief, crushing aphorisms. Rather than resolve or transcend his subject, Sharif insists on its persistence. His speaker is haunted by a beloved who appears in dreams, in silence, in absence. He writes confessions that circle back on themselves, makes promises he cannot keep, oscillates between desperation and defiance. Woven throughout are meditations on pain as generative, suffering births poetry, on writing as both symptom and cure, and on the human capacity to endure by articulating what cannot be otherwise expressed. This is not a collection of neat conclusions. Instead, it is a document of psychological entrapment; what it feels like to be unable to stop thinking, unable to stop feeling, unable to stop writing. For readers familiar with obsessive love, intrusive thoughts, or the way language becomes a lifeline, these verses offer both recognition and strange solace.