Scatter the Fog

Scatter the Fog brings together 24 poets under Aspiring Pens, published in Pakistan in 2022. The anthology is primarily poetry, with occasional prose pieces, and its voices span a wide range of moods, styles, and languages. Love in its many painful forms sits at the center of most pages: romantic longing, betrayal, unspoken feelings, and the particular ache of loving someone you cannot keep. Other poets turn inward, writing about mental fog, depression, grief, the masks people wear to appear fine, and the slow work of finding oneself after loss. A few pieces step beyond the personal and take on spiritual devotion, domestic violence, and how modern beauty standards and social media drain genuine feeling from human connection. The writing ranges in form and craft, from formally ambitious multilingual verse drawing on Arabic, Portuguese, and Urdu, to plain conversational poems and prose meditations. That range reflects 24 different writers at different points in their writing lives. What holds the book together is not a shared style but a shared impulse: to push through silence and confusion toward something clearer. The fog in the title names precisely what each writer here is working against: the unspoken, the hidden, the grief, the self-doubt, all the things that blur a person's sense of themselves and the world. To scatter the fog is to write it down.