If They Come for Us

Starred review from April 16, 2018
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.”

June 1, 2018
Performer, educator, and writer for the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls, Asghar presents a debut poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice. The poems, largely based on the experience of living in America as a Pakistani Muslim, reflect Asghar's keen perceptions about the search for, and inability to firmly fix upon, one true identity. In several powerful poems titled Partition, after the division of independent India and Pakistan along religious lines, Asghar explores family and cultural histories; how this split uprooted more than 14 million people and led to bloodshed; and patterns of discrimination, political failing, and violence. As Asghar traces the threads of her experiences, she slowly unfurls the larger fabric of her heritage and, in doing so, honors all who have been pushed aside, divided from country and culture, misrepresented, and misunderstood. Through simultaneously lyrical and frank poems like Kal, Ghareeb, and Halal, Asghar allows poignant contradictions to rise to the surface, like a lotus reaching through mud and murky water to beautifully bloom.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from May 1, 2018

Every age has its poets who spring-load every line with the personal and political so that you know what it was to be fully alive in that time and place--or torn from it. Asghar provides this anguished specificity in her debut poetry collection, a meditation on identity, dislocation, and loss. Ashgar is a Pakistani Muslim and orphan immigrant in America, and as her losses multiply--parents, family, home, country--her story sweeps wide, becoming the history of India, Partition, genocidal hatred, and timeless misogyny. In the telling, she moves freely in form, from prose poems to couplets to stanzas to more inventive grids and fill-in-the-blanks. "Microagression Bingo" uses the traditional 25-square card format to catalog racist insults. Taut lines, vivid language, and searing images range cover to cover, as in "Partition": "you're kashmiri until they burn your home. take your orchards. stake a/ different flag, until no one remembers the road that brings you back. you're Indian until they draw a border through punjab. Until the british/ captains spit paki as they sip your chai, add so much foam you can't/ taste home." VERDICT Inventive, sad, gripping, and beautiful; for most poetry readers.--Iris S. Rosenberg, New York

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