'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 navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people's histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.
'A debut poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice' Booklist
Orphaned as a child and marginalized in America,
Asghar captures the plight of alienation on a personal and political scale...With
If They Come For Us Asghar joins a rich history of Partition literature. Poets in the diaspora have mined the relationship between the violent remapping of the subcontinent with the instability of South Asian identity, language, and citizenship in their work...
a firm declaration of loyalty and love to Asghar's community. "my country is made / in my people's image / if they come for you they / come for me too," she writes. It is
a paean to her family-blood and not-who she turns to steadily, out of the past and into a shared future.
