Farah Ghafoor is a poet who was born to Pakistani immigrants in New York and raised in Fredericton, New Brunswick and Windsor, Ontario. Her work has appeared in an assortment of literary journals. Ghafoor holds a Bachelor of Management and Accounting from the University of Toronto and works in Tkaranto (Toronto) as a financial analyst.
Poetry
Shadow Price: Poems
Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2025.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Borrowing its title from a finance term—“the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists”—Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens.
What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor’s arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that “climate change denial” first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime.
Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast.