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A queer Punjabi speaker invents Udaasi Devi, a goddess of grief, to help carry personal, historical, and collective sorrow.
If you’re lucky enough to feel grief, you’ve loved something enough to miss it. Written in the wake of a mother's illness and death, while reckoning with the legacies of empire, displacement, ecological precarity, and contemporary violence, these poems refuse to separate intimate grief from historical experience. Grief becomes a companion, teacher, and doorway into deeper relationships with family, language, culture, land, and self.
Returning repeatedly to Punjab, Sikh teachings, folklore, and family history, the poems consider what it means to love a homeland across distance and time, particularly as climate change threatens the futures of the landscapes that shaped earlier generations. Bridging inherited traditions and contemporary poetics, these poems reimagine forms like ghazals and pantoums alongside experimental structures influenced by law, theatre, and critical writing. At this book’s center is an enduring conversation between the speaker and Udaasi, a relationship that shifts between divine companion, witness, muse, lover, ancestor, and friend.
"I found a god who could by Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal prioritizes honesty and vulnerability over emotional comfort. Within its structural gestures on the page, we find self-reflections that remind us of how intrinsically human it is to internalize life experiences on conscious and subconscious levels. Through language and imagery, this work not only asks us to acknowledge the echoes we carry, but also to follow the circulatory patterns until we can read their vibrations and build the answers we’re looking for. I found a god who could is an affirmation and invitation to reimagine ancestral spirituality when contemporary belief systems feel too foreign for our realities."—Jive Poetic, author of Skip Tracer
"This book is extraordinary. Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal gathers strands of memory, prayer, and story, keeping diasporic Punjabi life and ancestors close while tracing the barbed love of a mother and a truce found through song. The more I read these exquisite poems, the more I felt affiliated, the more I felt reminded of a powerful paradox—that the lonesomeness at the heart of creation may un-lonesome a reader spinning in their own solitary orbit. What burdens us is also, sometimes, what tethers us."—Kyo Maclear, author of Unearthing
"In I found a god who could, Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal turns her own grief into a mythology of survival, weaving poetry and prose around a goddess of grief she created to hold what words alone couldn't. Loss is one of life's guarantees, and none of us feel ready for it. In sharing her path through it so honestly, Preeti Kaur leaves the reader feeling less alone and that, in grief and in life, is one of the greatest gifts a book can give."—Jagmeet Singh, former leader of Canada’s federal NDP
"In Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal's stunning debut, I found a god who could, language spirals, thrums, and sways inside the complexities of grief. Drawing on Punjabi and Sikh histories, Dhaliwal's poems shimmer with embodied sonics and lush imagery to explore experiences of caretaking, colonial violence and the messiness of life and loss. She shows us that 'a poem is a land of mirrors,' reflecting the way the divine, prayer, and cultural memory river inside us. It is impossible not to feel these poems in your heart—they radiate with energy and insight. Dhaliwal's words are a gift."—Selina Boan, author of Undoing Hours
Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal (she/her) is a writer, educator, community facilitator, and former lawyer. The daughter of Punjabi immigrants, she was raised between Surrey and North Delta, BC. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and a Master of Laws from the University of Victoria. Her debut poetry collection is I found a god who could (Brick Books, 2027), and she was selected as the 2025 Poet-in-Residence at Upstart & Crow. She lives on the unceded past, present, and future territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations / Vancouver, British Columbia.