Description
Book Synopsis''Fatimah Asghar writes my heart'' Riz Ahmed
''Fatimah Asghar''s debut collection brought me to tears many times over. It is urgent, compelling and filled with fragments of history that have changed the face of the world. Its exploration of queerness, grief, Muslim identity, partition and being a woman of colour in a white supremacist world make this the most essential collection of poems you''ll read this year'' Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant, author of The One Who Wrote Destiny
Poet and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls captures her experience as a Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America, while exploring identity, violence, and healing.
an aunt teaches me how to tell
an edible flower
from a poisonous one.
just in case, I hear her say, just in case.
Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and
Trade Review
In forms both traditional...and unorthodox...Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible. Most vivid and revelatory are pieces such as 'Boy,' whose perspicacious turns and irreverent idiom conjure the rich, jagged textures of a childhood shadowed by loss. - New Yorker
Fatimah Asghar's debut collection
brought me to tears many times over. It is
urgent, compelling and filled with fragments of history that have changed the face of the world. Its exploration of queerness, grief, Muslim identity, partition and being a woman of colour in a white supremacist world make this
the most essential collection of poems you'll read this year - Nikesh Shukla
What an outstanding collection of poetry . . . [I] will be thinking about these poems for a long time to come - Goodreads
A
stunning work of art that tackles place, race, sexuality and violence. These poems - both
personal and
historical, both
celebratory and
aggrieved - are
unquestionably powerful in a way that would doubtless make both Gwendolyn Brooks and Harriet Monroe proud. - Chicago Review of Books
In this
awe-inspiring debut, Asghar, writer of the Emmy-nominated web series "Brown Girls," explores the painful, sometimes psychologically debilitating journey of establishing her identity as a queer brown woman within the confines of white America . . .
Honest, personal, and intimate without being insular or myopic, Asghar's collection reveals a sense of strength and hope found in identity and cultural history. - Publishers Weekly *starred review*
If They Come For Us is
a beautiful book of poems that, as powerfully and deeply as any book I've read in a good while, wonders about, explores and
laments our many inheritances of violence, which are also inheritances of sorrow, and the ways those inheritances reside in our bodies and imaginations. The ways those inheritances, in fact, structure our bodies and imaginations. And yet,
the wonder of this book is the way that throughout the anguish and sorrow and rage, despite it, there is tenderness.
