If They Come For Us - Softcover

Asghar, Fatimah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1472154622 ISBN 13: 9781472154620

Publisher: Corsair, 2019

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 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

About this title

Review:

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)

Fatimah Asghar writes my heart

(Riz Ahmed)

What an outstanding collection of poetry . . . [I] will be thinking about these poems for a long time to come (Roxane Gay Goodreads)

I have never read a book that made me want to eat, write, revise and love my body as much as IF THEY COME FOR US by Fatimah Asghar. This book gutted, cradled, and inspired me. Asghar's work isn't simply some of the most innovative work I've read; page after page, the book weaves productive ambiguity, textured explorations of the body and lyrical precision into a work that is somehow just as much a mammoth book of short stories, an experimental novel, and a soulful memoir. I'm not sure this nation is deserving of such a marvelous sensual and sensory book, but I know we needed this. We so needed this. (Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir)

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. There is sweetness. There is care. This book reminds us: these, too, are our inheritances. These, too, are our heirlooms. These, too, we must pass along. (Ross Gay, author of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry)

With breathtaking intelligence and care, Fatimah Asghar writes enduring poems that from varied angles investigate the histories and resonances of the Partition .... Part of the strength and vulnerability of this work is rooted in what I'm thinking of as a poetics of or. Asghar does not fix or flatten her subjects, but, rather, engages each poem as at least one of several imaginative routes through which she/we might engage history and possibility. In this way, these poems bend time, encircle kin, invent new forms of saying. They laugh, lose, lament, challenging language even as they are led by it... But my chest bursts most with Asghar's ability to render the fullness of life and human effort with the tiniest of details: mehndi on fingers, blisters on the back of a heel, laughter as a way of letting someone know you're still there. I leave these poems so deeply moved by her keen observations of the ephemeral. Even as she mourns the world, there is such fierce, resilient awe everywhere here. Such poems embolden me into love and dreaming and action. (Aracelis Girmay, author of Kingdom Animalia and The Black Maria)

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)

This summer, her debut poetry collection cemented her status as one of the city's greatest present-day poets. 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)

These poems are simultaneously elegant and playful, balancing the two elements with such formal innovation. The poet invents new forms and updates classic ones. (Elle)

In her debut poetry collection, Asghar explores the experience of being a Pakistani Muslim woman in America today. These poems are powerful and personal.

(Bustle)

Book Description:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Corsair
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1472154622
• ISBN 13: 9781472154620
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128