If They Come for Us
Poems
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“A debut poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice.”—Booklist
“Elegant and playful . . . The poet invents new forms and updates classic ones.”—Elle
“[Fatimah] Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible.”—The New Yorker
NAMED ONE OF THE TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY • FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD
an aunt teaches me how to tell
an edible flower
from a poisonous one.
just in case, I hear her say, just in case.
From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. 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.
Praise for If They Come for Us
“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.”—The New Yorker
“[Asghar’s] 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
“Taut lines, vivid language, and searing images range cover to cover. . . . Inventive, sad, gripping, and beautiful.”—Library Journal (starred review)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. For Asghar, home is to be found in a people's collective memory, and throughout she looks at otherness through the lens of generational trauma. The collection's opening images reflect legacies of destruction and death. In "For Peshawar," Asghar writes, "My uncle gifts me his earliest memory:/ a parking lot full of corpses." Her background in the cinematic arts shows in the form of such poems as "How We Left: Film Treatment." There, while grappling with an identity formed by personal and cultural divisions, the speaker confesses, "I love a man who saved my family by stealing our home./ I want a land that doesn't want me." Gendered violence also undergoes scrutiny, with Asghar's speaker asking, "what do I do with the boy/ who snuck his way inside/ me on my childhood playground?" 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: "our names this country's wood/ for the fire my people my people/ the long years we've survived the long/ years yet to come."
