Channing Tatum and Pedro Pascal write poems for Canadian musician Mustafa’s book

Actors Channing Tatum and Pedro Pascal have written poems for a new anthology curated by Canadian musician and poet Mustafa that also includes contributions by the writers George Saunders, Max Porter and Hanif Abdurraqib.

The book, titled Nour, explores themes of ceremony, loss and worship. “You told me God wasn’t real/ as we sat in the water in the dark that night/ I couldn’t see your eyes but I could feel the anger/ in the water”, opens Tatum’s poem, extracted below along with Pascal’s.

Mustafa’s debut album, Dunya, was released last September; long before that, he’d begun collecting songwriting credits for the likes of Camila Cabello’s She Loves Control, The Weeknd’s Attention, and Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes’ Monster.

The cover of Nour. Photograph: Yasin Osman/Courtesy of WeTransfer

His work has often focused on the impact of gang violence and the deaths of friends, drawing on his experiences growing up in the Regent Park neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada’s first social housing project. He has not returned to Regent Park since his brother was killed in 2023, he told an audience at a launch event for Nour with actor Daniel Kaluuya on Thursday evening.

“In my mind I want to talk about my brother,” he told George Saunders in a discussion with the author, a transcript of which is included in Nour. “But is that my responsibility? But he was killed, I want to reimagine his memory. I want to write beauty where there wasn’t. But then I also don’t want to misconstrue the reality of the harshness of what it was”.

Mustafa told Saunders that he finds himself reading pages of the writer’s Booker prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo to “kids in the hood … because you’ve developed your own language, and your own universe, it’s like it’s a universe that we all have access to and we all have equal right to enter.”

Nour “is the most important thing I’ve ever been a part of”, Mustafa told attenders at the launch event. The book also features work by the poet Noor Hindi and the musicians Daniel Caesar and Dev Hynes among others.

“With art, we all have to surrender, especially when it comes to poetry”, said Mustafa. “You can’t just put different literary devices together and hope for beauty. There is this invisible thread that ties great work together”.

Mustafa, poet, musician and curator of Nour. Photograph: Samuel Engelking

Worshipping Surrender by Channing Tatum

You told me God wasn’t real
as we sat in the water in the dark that night
I couldn’t see your eyes but I could feel the anger
in the water. You said if there was and that god
could let a child be violated it was not a god
worth worship. Many other things were said
on many nights in that angry water
Mostly talk of power soaked in booze and fear

So it’s safe to say I’ve never known religion
I still hear your voice say “Worshipping anything
is for fools” over the dull sound of the football on TV
I always imagine clowns on bikes with baskets on the front
Honking and riding in circles

But my great secret is that I have always felt you
Felt angels. Felt love.
Felt the magic of so deeply caring for another
I never knew what exactly to call it.
Now as I write this maybe that’s what worship has been for me

I have never known religion but I’ve always
known you. My love. Love. Love.
I will always worship love. I surrender
my love always. I surrender my love forever.

Untitled by Pedro Pascal

I see you
late bloomer
smoking just after sunrise for the first time.
Wearing pants and buying pillows
dropping cash
then leaving them lonely in a stranger’s closet.
Mushroom lamp says “What the fuck? Lemme outta here.”
I explain to her that first I have to go back
and back and back again
until I understand that I will always be in love with those footprints.
“Fine.”
People smoke here
because they like me. See me sitting near the bird shit, making things up that never happened.
But they’re cool with it.
Someone tells me she was kidnapped by a man who held a knife to her neck
because her sister always picks the wrong men.
I tell her I was a very late bed wetter.
All the other talk happens alone,
never into a mirror and never to you.
But to objects caught off guard by my hostility,
by the shape of this grief.
Eleven months and only this:
I am struck by the lightning of your presence
now that you are gone.

• Nour can be downloaded for free through WeTransfer.