If They Come for Us

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."