Author: Eileen Myles
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062389106
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
"Myles speaks with one of the essential voices in American poetry." —New York Times A collection of new and selected past work from one of America’s most celebrated poets Eileen Myles's poetry and prose are known for their blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral, in which readers can peer into existent places, like the East Village of Myles's iconic Chelsea Girls. But they are also lifted into dreams, through writing that has the vividness and energy of fantasy. I Must Be Living Twice brings selections from the poet’s previous work together with a set of bold new poems, through which Myles continues to refine their sardonic, unapologetic, and fiercely intellectual literary voice. Steeped in the culture of New York City, Myles's stomping grounds and the home of their most well-known work, they provide a wide-open lens into radical life.
I Must Be Living Twice
Author: Eileen Myles
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062389106
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
"Myles speaks with one of the essential voices in American poetry." —New York Times A collection of new and selected past work from one of America’s most celebrated poets Eileen Myles's poetry and prose are known for their blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral, in which readers can peer into existent places, like the East Village of Myles's iconic Chelsea Girls. But they are also lifted into dreams, through writing that has the vividness and energy of fantasy. I Must Be Living Twice brings selections from the poet’s previous work together with a set of bold new poems, through which Myles continues to refine their sardonic, unapologetic, and fiercely intellectual literary voice. Steeped in the culture of New York City, Myles's stomping grounds and the home of their most well-known work, they provide a wide-open lens into radical life.
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062389106
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
"Myles speaks with one of the essential voices in American poetry." —New York Times A collection of new and selected past work from one of America’s most celebrated poets Eileen Myles's poetry and prose are known for their blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral, in which readers can peer into existent places, like the East Village of Myles's iconic Chelsea Girls. But they are also lifted into dreams, through writing that has the vividness and energy of fantasy. I Must Be Living Twice brings selections from the poet’s previous work together with a set of bold new poems, through which Myles continues to refine their sardonic, unapologetic, and fiercely intellectual literary voice. Steeped in the culture of New York City, Myles's stomping grounds and the home of their most well-known work, they provide a wide-open lens into radical life.
Chelsea Girls
Author: Eileen Myles
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062394673
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
Available once again for a new generation of readers, the groundbreaking and candid coming-of-age novel in-real-time from one of America's most celebrated poets that is considered a cult classic. In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms life into a work of art. Told in her audacious voice, made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles’ 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her volatile adolescence, her unabashed “lesbianity,” and her riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s New York. Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young artist’s life; and poignant with stories of love, humor, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of a writer’s education, and a modern chronicle of how a young female writer shrugged off the chains of a rigid cultural identity meant to define her.
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062394673
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
Available once again for a new generation of readers, the groundbreaking and candid coming-of-age novel in-real-time from one of America's most celebrated poets that is considered a cult classic. In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms life into a work of art. Told in her audacious voice, made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles’ 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her volatile adolescence, her unabashed “lesbianity,” and her riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s New York. Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young artist’s life; and poignant with stories of love, humor, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of a writer’s education, and a modern chronicle of how a young female writer shrugged off the chains of a rigid cultural identity meant to define her.
Cool for You
Author: Eileen Myles
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619029170
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Grainy and stripped down, this gritty novel traces the downbeat progress of a tough, queer girl growing up in working-class Boston by "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde” (The New York Times). Why can’t I live right now. Because I am not rich, I am not a saint. But I do know this: not all of us were sent here to work. The first published novel of legendary poet and performer Eileen Myles follows a queer female growing up in working-class Boston, straining against the institutions that hold her: family, Catholic school, jobs at a camp, at a nursing home, at a school for developmentally disabled adult males. She wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and journeys through a series of low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. Schooled by mean and memorable Catholic nuns, this tomboy heroine stumbles and dreams her way through the painful corridors of family, early sexual encounters, and an eye-opening series of jobs caring for the sick and insane--the abandoned wards of the state. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, and how they do (and do not) get out of the hands of their families and the state. Without artifice or pseudonym, protagonist Eileen Myles boldly sets down a rich and graphic account of female experience in this world. Free-ranging and deadpan, tragic and joyful, this is a book about women, gender, class, bodies, escape, and what it means to be “inside.” Never more relevant, and now with an introduction by Chris Kraus. "Eileen Myles is a genius!"--Dorothy Allison
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619029170
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Grainy and stripped down, this gritty novel traces the downbeat progress of a tough, queer girl growing up in working-class Boston by "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde” (The New York Times). Why can’t I live right now. Because I am not rich, I am not a saint. But I do know this: not all of us were sent here to work. The first published novel of legendary poet and performer Eileen Myles follows a queer female growing up in working-class Boston, straining against the institutions that hold her: family, Catholic school, jobs at a camp, at a nursing home, at a school for developmentally disabled adult males. She wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and journeys through a series of low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. Schooled by mean and memorable Catholic nuns, this tomboy heroine stumbles and dreams her way through the painful corridors of family, early sexual encounters, and an eye-opening series of jobs caring for the sick and insane--the abandoned wards of the state. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, and how they do (and do not) get out of the hands of their families and the state. Without artifice or pseudonym, protagonist Eileen Myles boldly sets down a rich and graphic account of female experience in this world. Free-ranging and deadpan, tragic and joyful, this is a book about women, gender, class, bodies, escape, and what it means to be “inside.” Never more relevant, and now with an introduction by Chris Kraus. "Eileen Myles is a genius!"--Dorothy Allison
For Now
Author: Eileen Myles
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300244649
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 96
Book Description
“[Myles] has a good time journeying through Hell, and like a hip Virgil, . . . is happy to show us the way.”—NPR In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time. For Myles, time’s “optic quality” is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300244649
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 96
Book Description
“[Myles] has a good time journeying through Hell, and like a hip Virgil, . . . is happy to show us the way.”—NPR In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time. For Myles, time’s “optic quality” is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.
The Beauty of Living Twice
Author: Sharon Stone
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525656774
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • Sharon Stone tells her own story: a journey of healing, love, and purpose. • “Not your typical Hollywood autobiography. Brutally honest, restless and questing.” —O, The Oprah Magazine Sharon Stone, one of the most renowned actresses in the world, suffered a massive stroke that cost her not only her health, but her career, family, fortune, and global fame. In The Beauty of Living Twice, Stone chronicles her efforts to rebuild her life and writes about her slow road back to wholeness and health. In a business that doesn’t accept failure, in a world where too many voices are silenced, Stone found the power to return, the courage to speak up, and the will to make a difference in the lives of men, women, and children around the globe. Over the course of these intimate pages, as candid as a personal conversation, Stone talks about her pivotal roles, her life-changing friendships, her worst disappointments, and her greatest accomplishments. She reveals how she went from a childhood of trauma and violence to a career in an industry that in many ways echoed those same assaults, under cover of money and glamour. She describes the strength and meaning she found in her children, and in her humanitarian efforts. And ultimately, she shares how she fought her way back to find not only her truth, but her family’s reconciliation and love. Stone made headlines not just for her beauty and her talent, but for her candor and her refusal to “play nice,” and it’s those same qualities that make this memoir so powerful. The Beauty of Living Twice is a book for the wounded and a book for the survivors; it’s a celebration of women’s strength and resilience, a reckoning, and a call to activism. It is proof that it’s never too late to raise your voice and speak out.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525656774
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • Sharon Stone tells her own story: a journey of healing, love, and purpose. • “Not your typical Hollywood autobiography. Brutally honest, restless and questing.” —O, The Oprah Magazine Sharon Stone, one of the most renowned actresses in the world, suffered a massive stroke that cost her not only her health, but her career, family, fortune, and global fame. In The Beauty of Living Twice, Stone chronicles her efforts to rebuild her life and writes about her slow road back to wholeness and health. In a business that doesn’t accept failure, in a world where too many voices are silenced, Stone found the power to return, the courage to speak up, and the will to make a difference in the lives of men, women, and children around the globe. Over the course of these intimate pages, as candid as a personal conversation, Stone talks about her pivotal roles, her life-changing friendships, her worst disappointments, and her greatest accomplishments. She reveals how she went from a childhood of trauma and violence to a career in an industry that in many ways echoed those same assaults, under cover of money and glamour. She describes the strength and meaning she found in her children, and in her humanitarian efforts. And ultimately, she shares how she fought her way back to find not only her truth, but her family’s reconciliation and love. Stone made headlines not just for her beauty and her talent, but for her candor and her refusal to “play nice,” and it’s those same qualities that make this memoir so powerful. The Beauty of Living Twice is a book for the wounded and a book for the survivors; it’s a celebration of women’s strength and resilience, a reckoning, and a call to activism. It is proof that it’s never too late to raise your voice and speak out.
Evolution
Author: Eileen Myles
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802146368
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Book Description
The new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Chelsea Girls reads like “an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer” (Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review). The first all-new collection of poems from Eileen Myles since 2011’s Snowflake/different streets, Evolution follows the author’s critically acclaimed Afterglow (a dog memoir), as well as a volume of selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice. In these new poems, we find the eminent, exuberant writer at the forefront of American literature, upending genre in a new vernacular that radiates insight, purpose, and risk while channeling of Quakers, Fresca, and cell phones. This long-awaited new collection “lopes forward in the strutting style of the witnessing and sincere, but gorgeously nonaustere, poet in New York…The gift of Evolution is its bold depiction of the textually-rendered ‘I’-Eileen” (Kenyon Review). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802146368
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Book Description
The new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Chelsea Girls reads like “an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer” (Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review). The first all-new collection of poems from Eileen Myles since 2011’s Snowflake/different streets, Evolution follows the author’s critically acclaimed Afterglow (a dog memoir), as well as a volume of selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice. In these new poems, we find the eminent, exuberant writer at the forefront of American literature, upending genre in a new vernacular that radiates insight, purpose, and risk while channeling of Quakers, Fresca, and cell phones. This long-awaited new collection “lopes forward in the strutting style of the witnessing and sincere, but gorgeously nonaustere, poet in New York…The gift of Evolution is its bold depiction of the textually-rendered ‘I’-Eileen” (Kenyon Review). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Pathetic Literature
Author: Eileen Myles
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802157173
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 595
Book Description
An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic” “Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature, a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone. Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego in the early 2000s, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their identification of “pathetic” as ripe for reinvention forms the need for this anthology, which includes a hearty 106 contributors, encompassing canonical global stars like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, literary libertines like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as extraordinary writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris. Wrenching and discomfiting prose by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jack Halberstam, and Porochista Khakpour rubs shoulders with poems by Natalie Diaz, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, and Ariana Reines, and butts up against fiction from Chester Himes, Djuna Barnes, Chris Kraus, and Qiu Miaojin, among so many others, including Myles’s own opening salvo of their 1992 presidential campaign. The result is a completely anomalous and uplifting anthology that encourages a fresh political discourse on literature, as well as supplying an essential compendium of pained, awkward, queer, trans, gleeful, and ever-jarring ways to think differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful planet.
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802157173
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 595
Book Description
An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic” “Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature, a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone. Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego in the early 2000s, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their identification of “pathetic” as ripe for reinvention forms the need for this anthology, which includes a hearty 106 contributors, encompassing canonical global stars like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, literary libertines like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as extraordinary writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris. Wrenching and discomfiting prose by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jack Halberstam, and Porochista Khakpour rubs shoulders with poems by Natalie Diaz, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, and Ariana Reines, and butts up against fiction from Chester Himes, Djuna Barnes, Chris Kraus, and Qiu Miaojin, among so many others, including Myles’s own opening salvo of their 1992 presidential campaign. The result is a completely anomalous and uplifting anthology that encourages a fresh political discourse on literature, as well as supplying an essential compendium of pained, awkward, queer, trans, gleeful, and ever-jarring ways to think differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful planet.
Inferno
Author: Eileen Myles
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
ISBN: 9781593762117
Category : Experimental fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Loosely following Dante's epic by fashioning her own riveting account into three distinct parts, Eileen Myles brings her unparalleled brand of raw intellect and insight to her latest novel, The Inferno. The first part of the story, mesmerizing readers with its ripple of memoir, tells the saga (or hell) of a poet girl. The second, on the surface, provides instruction on how to write a poem--but it also pulls a clever bait-and-switch by informing readers how to become a lesbian as well. Myles's exposition of lesbianity, in fact, includes six pages of female genitalia that rival anything Henry Miller ever produced. The third and final part of the book is a fictional proposal to a funding organization in which the author obliges the foundation's request to supply them with her career narrative, but instead of the tedious sanitized version, she offers a bluntly truthful one. Full of travel disasters, bad readings of wonderful poems, and death, this last section is Myles's Purgatorio--a litany chronicling the career of a poet and her writing life. Myles's rebellious spirit is fully present here as she injects her signature blurring of memoir and fiction, poem and essay, to reinforce her status as one of America's most groundbreaking writers. This eagerly anticipated follow-up to her landmark Cool for You will not disappoint fans of Myles or of modern literature itself.
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
ISBN: 9781593762117
Category : Experimental fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Loosely following Dante's epic by fashioning her own riveting account into three distinct parts, Eileen Myles brings her unparalleled brand of raw intellect and insight to her latest novel, The Inferno. The first part of the story, mesmerizing readers with its ripple of memoir, tells the saga (or hell) of a poet girl. The second, on the surface, provides instruction on how to write a poem--but it also pulls a clever bait-and-switch by informing readers how to become a lesbian as well. Myles's exposition of lesbianity, in fact, includes six pages of female genitalia that rival anything Henry Miller ever produced. The third and final part of the book is a fictional proposal to a funding organization in which the author obliges the foundation's request to supply them with her career narrative, but instead of the tedious sanitized version, she offers a bluntly truthful one. Full of travel disasters, bad readings of wonderful poems, and death, this last section is Myles's Purgatorio--a litany chronicling the career of a poet and her writing life. Myles's rebellious spirit is fully present here as she injects her signature blurring of memoir and fiction, poem and essay, to reinforce her status as one of America's most groundbreaking writers. This eagerly anticipated follow-up to her landmark Cool for You will not disappoint fans of Myles or of modern literature itself.
Not Me
Author: Eileen Myles
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
This brilliant, incisive volume captures the high points of Myles' work in New York City during the 1980s. Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know What the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone. This breakthrough volume, published in 1991 by the author of Cool For You and Chelsea Girls captures the high points of Myles' work in New York City during the 1980s. Poet, novelist, lesbian culture hero and one-time presidential candidate, Myles has influenced a whole generation of young queer girl writers and activists. She is one of the most brilliant, incisive, immediate writers living today.
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
This brilliant, incisive volume captures the high points of Myles' work in New York City during the 1980s. Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know What the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone. This breakthrough volume, published in 1991 by the author of Cool For You and Chelsea Girls captures the high points of Myles' work in New York City during the 1980s. Poet, novelist, lesbian culture hero and one-time presidential candidate, Myles has influenced a whole generation of young queer girl writers and activists. She is one of the most brilliant, incisive, immediate writers living today.
If They Come for Us
Author: Fatimah Asghar
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0525509798
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 130
Book Description
“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 “[Fatimah] Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible.”—The New Yorker NAMED ONE OF THE TOP TEN 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 that collection 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 “[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 “Taut lines, vivid language, and searing images range cover to cover. . . . Inventive, sad, gripping, and beautiful.”—Library Journal (starred review)
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0525509798
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 130
Book Description
“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 “[Fatimah] Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible.”—The New Yorker NAMED ONE OF THE TOP TEN 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 that collection 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 “[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 “Taut lines, vivid language, and searing images range cover to cover. . . . Inventive, sad, gripping, and beautiful.”—Library Journal (starred review)