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  • If They Come for Us

  • Poems
  • Written by: Fatimah Asghar
  • Narrated by: Fatimah Asghar
  • Length: 1 hr and 22 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 rating)

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If They Come for Us

Written by: Fatimah Asghar
Narrated by: Fatimah Asghar
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Publisher's Summary

“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)

Named one of the top 10 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 collection that 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)

“This summer, [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)

©2018 Fatimah Asghar (P)2018 Random House Audio

What the critics say

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 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the 2015 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)

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