“What makes this work particularly impressive is how many of the concerns Ari faces are issues children encounter regardless of their gender identities. While Ari will particularly resonate with queer kids, their fears and secret joys are sure to speak volumes to any outsider or someone in need of a friend.”

-Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

“This book should be on everyone’s shelf — religious and non-religious alike. It is a raw, passionate, gritty tale of not only these two men who chose different paths, and are still making choices, but also of the many people around them who make their own life decisions to love, hate, accept, kill, tolerate or repel them.” 

-Philadelphia Gay News

“Hasan Namir’s Umbilical Cord is an exceptionally beautiful love poem that lays bare the joy and complexity of family life. In this collection, Hasan continues to be a genius of confessional forms that breathe, sing, and cry.”

—Jordan Scott, author of Night & Ox

“Umbilical Cord’s poems have a lucent quality and a supple rhythm that carries their tenderness to a reader. In an instant, the poems can become as raw, as immediate as touch. This work begins in heat and heartbeat, as a relationship and a family come into being, and it reflects the intimacies, anxieties, and devotions of love.  At once personally revealing and focused outward on the challenges that queer families face, in Umbilical Cord love triumphs over intolerance, and the future, named “Malek,” is nurtured by two devoted fathers.” 

—Kaie Kellough, author of Dominoes at the Crossroads and Magnetic Equator

“In Hasan Namir’s Umbilical Cord we see a queer revisionism of family that shows how love can link us together like a cord, pushing against the heterocentrism of childrearing. It’s poetry that takes a deep dive into all of the fears and anxieties of parenting as queer, but above all else, this book, at its core, is a love poem.” 

—Daniel Zomparelli, author of Everything Is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person

“Describing his journey as a gay man to parenthood via a surrogate who shares his spouse’s genetics, Namir is able to explode an annoying vestige of the illogic upon which the straight mainstream, with teary-eyed desperation, sometimes still tries to assert its exclusivity.”

– ​John Barton, Gertrude Press