Kazim Ali’s On the Brink of Belief brings together voices across faiths, languages, and diasporas to examine what happens when queer people confront, inherit, reject, or reform spiritual belief systems. But to call it a collection “about faith” alone would be reductive. These essays and poems move beyond abstraction into memory, the body, and the awkward rooms of familial ritual to ask: What does it mean to believe while queer, to believe despite betrayal, to believe while re-making the language of the divine?

One of the most striking pieces is poet Birat Bijay Ojha’s In Foreign for Home, which searingly captures the displacement of body, belief, and language.

“My relationship with Gods / is complicated like that,” he writes, as if to say the divine, too, has become a contested homeland.

He continues, “Or perhaps it’s the complex / that offers the edge to / live on the brink of belief.” The poem echoes the title of the collection in the most intimate way. That brink becomes both a precipice and a vantage point – a space of hesitation and radical possibility. Ojha concludes with haunting repetition:

“Too foreign for home

Too foreign for home

Never enough for both.”

The echo is devastating. It conjures the queer diasporic condition in its starkest form, not as metaphor, but as lived truth. Here, home is not where the heart is. It is where the wound keeps reopening.

Elsewhere, in On This Afternoon, Like Every Other by Ipsa, a sensuous and chilling folklore of desire and danger unfolds. The story blurs the line between ghost tale and love poem, reimagining the Shakchunni – the ghost of a married woman said to return not just as a specter, but as a seductress, seeking vengeance: “waiting to beguile a good, married man with her wicked manners.” The narrator’s voice is soaked in heat, lust, and menace, culminating in the haunting refrain: “There is so much laughter, always.”

Other pieces shift in tone and form. Without giving away too much, several writers – Megha Harish, Dia Yonzon, and Darius Stewart – continue this excavation of queer longing in strikingly different registers. 

Megha Harish’s I’d Never Seen Water So Damn Gay is irreverent and electric, queering marine biology with joy and wit. “She made the sea dragon zaddies,” Harish writes, and later, “Good thing fish don’t go to school. / They don’t learn what they’re not allowed to be.”

In contrast, Dia Yonzon’s You Often Forget That I Am Queer When You Kiss My Lips is tender and quietly devastating, mapping the ache of being half-seen in intimacy. “You kiss me as The Notebook plays on. This scene is my favourite part, I protest. You are my favourite scene, you whisper.”

Darius Stewart’s Love, Like in the Movies is a haunting reflection on Black queer adolescence, desire, and survival. He captures the cost of being visible in a brutal world: “Perhaps they’d call him mangy dog among other names: bitch, faggot, dicklicker.” The piece builds toward a boy alone on a bridge at dusk, wind and memory rising around him, a moment suspended between pain and release.

What ties these works together is not sameness of experience, but a shared refusal to be flattened. Together, they form a chorus of lives that remain unquiet, even especially, at the brink.

Ultimately, what makes On the Brink of Belief a landmark anthology is not just its literary merit, though there is much of that. It is the political and emotional ground it clears simply by existing: a book where queerness and faith do not cancel each other out, where writing becomes both survival and song. In a time when the moral panic around queerness is being legislated and spiritual life is being policed, this book insists on multiplicity, on joy that is hard-won and still radiant.

This is not an anthology of answers, but of incantations. And in reading it, one feels less alone, on the brink of belief, yes, but also on the brink of something braver.

Aditya Tiwari is one of modern India’s leading gay poets. His new poetry collection, All That’s Left Behind, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster India in 2026. You can follow him on Instagram and X at @aprilislush.  

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