Where do we find ourselves, in a Hassan Melehy poem? On a staircase with a lover when something has already gone wrong. In old cities with stone gates and ramparts. In the quiet town of Scotland, Connecticut with rage curling around our ankles. Stacking stones in a field and wondering how to tell the tale of our she-wolf mother or caught under the "iron dome/of some huckster’s ego." Throughout the poems of Doctrinal Shuffle, Hassan Melehy’s second book of poems, we enter half-told stories sideways and leave them elated, flattened, or spun around until the world wobbles in our dizziness. He takes us to what he calls "a place I never was/and where I came into being." Go there with him.
—Robert Archambeau


A poignant and lyrical reflection on living in diaspora, as well as a sharp commentary on the devastation wrought by capitalism and neo-colonialism.These poems are incisive as they are beautiful ... a must-read.
—Susan Muaddi Darraj, author of Behind You Is the Sea (Pen/Faulkner Award Finalist, Washington Post Notable Works of Fiction from 2024, Ms. Magazine Favorite Books of the Year 2024, The New Yorker Best Books of 2024)


In Doctrinal Shuffle, Hassan Melehy composes poems of remarkable intelligence and quiet emotional force. These are meditations that move fluidly between personal memory, history, politics, and philosophy, finding in each the fragile, persistent traces of human connection. Melehy possesses an extraordinary ability to transform the language of institutions, commerce, and civic life into lyric inquiry, revealing unexpected tenderness beneath systems that often seem designed to erase it. His poems are at once deeply reflective and strikingly contemporary, balancing wit, compassion, and formal precision while asking what remains of identity, love, ancestry, and belonging amid the machinery of the modern world. Doctrinal Shuffle is a rich and rewarding collection from a poet whose vision continues to expand the possibilities of the lyric.
—Geoffrey Gatza, author of Self Geofferential (2025)