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Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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IF THEY COME FOR US

Fatimah Asghar

A powerful and imaginative début poetry collection by the co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series "Brown Girls".
In this collection, Asghar captures the experience of being a Pakistani Muslim woman in a contemporary world, while exploring identity, violence, and healing. This is perfect reading for fans of Rupi Kaur's #1 New York Times bestseller, MILK AND HONEY, Ross Gay, Morgan Parker, Ocean Vuong, and Solmaz Sharif.

IF THEY COME FOR US contains 30 new poems, and the collection is rounded out by 14 previously-published poems that have been featured in national publications such as the New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Rumpus, and more. At the root of her writing, Asghar grapples with coming-of-age as a woman without the guidance of a mother, after being orphaned as a young girl. She confronts questions of sexuality and race, and what it's like to navigate a world that put a target on her back. Her poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests in our relationships with friends and family, and in our own understanding of identity. Using experimental forms and a mix of lyrical and brash language, Asghar faces her own understanding of identity and place and belonging, through a linguistic braiding together of personal and marginalized people's histories.

Fatimah Asghar's star is rapidly on the rise. Her web series "Brown Girls" was recently sold to HBO, and it had over 200,000 views within the first week, across 47 different countries! Since the premiere of "Brown Girls," Fatimah has been featured in Slate, TIME, Teen Vogue, W Magazine, and more. She has performed her poetry at TED X.
Available products
Book

Published 2018-06-01 by One World

Book

Published 2018-06-01 by One World

Comments

...taut lines, vivid language, and searing images range cover to cover. Inventive, sad, gripping, and beautiful.

In the title poem of IF THEY COME FOR US, Fatimah Asghar writes, 'my people my people I can't be lost,' a statement that is as much a call to arms as it is a fervent plea... 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. This book is a brightness that will carry you as you carry it with you.

...the wonder of this book is the way that throughout the anguish and sorrow and rage, despite it, there is tenderness.

a marvelous sensual and sensory book

...these poems bend time, encircle kin, invent new forms of saying. They laugh, lose, lament, challenging language even as they are led by it. But my chest bursts most with Asghar's ability to render the fullness of life and human effort with the tiniest of details...

...a debut poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice.... Asghar allows poignant contradictions to rise to the surface, like a lotus reaching through mud and murky water to beautifully bloom.

... awe-inspiring debut...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.