If They Come For Us: Poems - Softcover

"[Fatimah] 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. . . . 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."--Booklist

"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. . . . Her story sweeps wide, becoming the history of India, Partition, genocidal hatred, and timeless misogyny. In the telling, she moves freely in form. . . .Taut lines, vivid language, and searing images range cover to cover. . . . Inventive, sad, gripping, and beautiful."--Library Journal (starred review)

"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. . . . 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.'"--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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. 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 Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry

"Fatimah Asghar's work isn't simply some of the most innovative poetry 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 How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and Long Division

"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 puzzle, a flashlight in the face of imminent darkness, and even a whole home."--Tarfia Faizullah, author of Registers of Illuminated Villages and Seam

"Part of the strength and vulnerability of this work is rooted in what I'm thinking of as a poetics of --Aracelis Girmay, author of Kingdom Animalia and The Black Maria

Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, performer, educator, and writer. She is the writer of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. She is a member of Dark Noise and a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.