Asghar - If They Come for Us

These, too, are our heirlooms. These, too, we must pass along. ROSS GAY , author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry 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. Asghars work isnt simply some of the most innovative work Ive 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. Im 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 How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and Long Division In the title poem of If They Come For Us, Fatimah Asghar writes, my people my people I cant be lost, a statement that is as much a call to arms as it is a fervent plea. After reading Asghars widely anticipated debut collection, I not only believed her, but began to feel that all of us could be as sacred, protected, and celebrated by looking to each others stories and considering them alongside our own. In poems that are as historically aware as they are forward-thinking, Asghar reminds us with wit, wisdom, and compassion that a truly felt and thoughtfully written poem can be many things at once: a salve, an artifact, a talisman, and a flashlight in the face of imminent darkness. This book is a brightness that will carry you as you carry it with you. TARFIA FAIZULLAH , author of Registers of Illuminated Villages and Seam With breathtaking intelligence and care, Fatimah Asghar writes enduring poems that, from varied angles, investigate the histories and resonances of the Partition across the lives of her subjects.

Her vision is attuned to the peripheries, is diasporic, and, thus, steeped in loss, simultaneities, invention. Part of the strength and vulnerability of this work is rooted in what Im 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, and lament, challenging language even as they are led by it: Allah, you gave us a language / where yesterday & tomorrow / are the same word. [] Tomorrow means I might // have her forever. [] Tomorrow means I might // have her forever.

Yesterday means / I say goodbye, again. But my chest bursts most with Ashgars 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 youre 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 my dreams, the children are still alive at school. In my dreams they still play.