Extraction

A review of Rogue Planet

Mehvash Amin

Mina Malik serves up an emotive yet erudite poetry collection. Our editor in chief shares her thoughts, followed by a selection of the poems.

Mina Malik is a poet, writer, editor and publisher, and though she has been published by various journals around the world, she has just published her first chapbook, Rogue Planet (The Peepul Press, 2026).

Of the title, she says: “A rogue planet is an actual astronomical phenomenon; it’s a celestial body with the mass of a planet, but unlike a planet it doesn’t orbit a star. Rogue planets float freely through space. As a science nerd, I liked the notion of a planet going rogue, of extracting itself from the accepted order of the universe and charting its own course.”

But the fourteen poems published in this collection gather the perambulations of not just a cerebral and intellectual mind, but also painfully accurate portraits of love—or its disappearance—sometimes articulated through laser-like observations, sometimes seen through quotidian tasks, like folding clothes or defrosting the freezer.

Her language contains beautiful poetic similes—“the swallow-swoop of hope”, for example, or the way that “your hopeful breath will freeze and fall/startled, upon the casual ledge of another’s back…” or “excellent bone-knives, peeling your flesh-fruit open…”

In other words, she builds a world sometimes felt universally, sometimes intuited by a singular intelligence, but expressed in a way only Mina could have articulated it, with humour, erudition and an acute awareness of the occasional shift from the symmetry of the universe to something else, that sometimes slide from the elegant geometry of order to one that holds the inchoate beauty of solitude and rebelliousness—like a rogue planet that refuses to orbit a star.

Enjoy the following two poems from this sensitive collection:

The Andromeda Paradox

If I were here and you were running,

the sky would be different. This is because

of light, of relativity, 

of motion changing time.

I wonder what Andromeda thought,

chained to a rock, blasted night and day

with salt water and Cetus’ bad breath,

When Perseus came along, him flying,

her, fixed. Did the seconds shift, the light

glancing off the water and his hair and her arms

different for them both

Did she see a prince, did he see a wife

The first time we met 

I was sitting, and you walked in the door

'Radiance' by Maryam Ali Moinuddin (graphite on paper; 2023)

The End of Love

The End of love walks in silently,

stands in the corner. There is plenty of time.

The End of love knows it is here for a while.

Things start to go missing. This is the

poltergeist End, sneaking away the kiss

in a stairwell, hands held under tables,

sleepy morning eyes. 

Things begin to grow holes. This is the

moth End, worrying crevices into

canyons, a nibble at a time.

Things begin to seem farther away

than they appear. This is the trickster End,

distorting mirrors and words,

slipping rings off fingers, looking

back just when you turn away.

The End of love comes one lost touch

at a time. One evasion at a time, one

flinch at a time. The End quietly

unspools distance until one day

You turn to look, and there is only

a shadow on the horizon.

Rogue Planet is available here and here.

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Mina Malik is a poet, writer and editor at The Peepul Press, which she co-founded in 2023. She holds an Mst. in Creative Writing from Oxford University, an MPhil in English Literature from Punjab University and a Bsc Hons. in Literature and Philosophy from LUMS. Mina has had poems published in Rowayat, Vallum and other literary publications around the world, and was longlisted for the Briefly Poetry Prize in 2022. Mina is the prose editor at The Aleph Review and is represented in the UK by Peters Fraser Dunlop.

Maryam Ali Moinuddin is a Pakistani artist who received her BFA with Distinction from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2023. Since then, her work has been presented in various international, academic and nonprofit institutions, including exhibitions at the Cranbrook Art Museum, COMO Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright ‘Smith’ House, Alhamra Art Center, the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL), Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery and the Punjab National Council of the Arts. She currently lives and works in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she is a second-year MFA candidate in Painting and a Gilbert Fellow at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.