Fatimah Asghar will be speaking at PRoB media partner City of Asylum on July 28th, 2026 at 7P.M.
Fatimah Asghar’s work has always had a soft spot for me. The first time I came across their work was in early 2024 when I read When We Were Sisters, a delicate telling of a story of three sisters making sense of their lives together after the tragic loss of their father. Considering their lyrical prose, I knew that Asghar’s poetry would be something that I would connect with as well, especially given that their themes of identity, sisterhood, family and belonging were questions that I have always engaged with in my life. When I read Asghar’s If They Come for Us I saw the power of poetry in bridging history and personal memory in making sense of the aftermath of displacement and colonialism and the role it plays in negotiating identity in everyday life.
I was very eager to read their new poetry collection Daughter of the Mountains because in their previous work, they speculate about what it would be like to return to their ancestral home of Pakistan. This book does exactly that, as it is a collection of poems describing what it was like for them to return to Pakistan for the first time after the loss of their father, and they did so in the most powerful and emotional way. Each poem felt personal, a way for Asghar to document their experiences and emotions as they returned home. Compared to their previous collection, there was something so deeply fragile about Daughter of the Mountains. It felt like an offering, a delicate work of art that Asghar decided to share with the world. In my interview with Asghar, they talk about how poetry feels like zooming into a moment, a memory, a feeling, and in this collection, each poem seemed to have a distinct emotion attached to it.
The collection is subtitled poems of homecoming and heartbreak, and this description reflects n the undertones of grief in each poem. Asghar feels a disconnection with their Pakistani roots for many reasons, including the loss of their parents and growing up United States. In that sense, belonging feels fractured and met with heartbreak and grief. At the same time, there is a clear connection and longing that Asghar demonstrates in their poems for the home of their parents, and this negotiation and tension between homecoming and heartbreak underscores the collection in profound ways.
Just as they did in When We Were Sisters, Asghar reflects on family, sisterhood and orphanhood in this collection. While in their novel they question how sisterhood filled the gap for other missing relationships because of losing their parents so young and growing up with a neglectful uncle as their primary adult figure, in their collection they take this questioning one step further by considering how past family betrayals and conflicts impact current family dynamics. The following poem titled Nazar showcases this:
What’s not mine/back to sender/an endless nights sky
The country my great-great-great grand left/
The tribe/silver coins made into jewelry/crowning the head
The house of my mother
& when she died/ her brothers took/ my dead
Dad’s money/blooming
In the account of my uncle/ from the soil on the other
Side of the border where my family lived/
My mom’s gold/ passed through the hands
Of her sisters/kept in drawers
& never returned/ an invisible border around me
& my sisters/ orphaned/ evil eyed
My kin is my wealth/ a basket of ripe apples
Orcharding/ except when they lied
& Stole from me/ death being the perfect heist
Like stealing from a baby
This passage shows how Asghar thinks about migration, death and thievery within the family before they and their sisters grew up and how those subjects impacted their life in significant ways. In this context, how does one heal the intergenerational trauma that has led to fractured relationships in the present? This question keeps coming up in the collection without clear answers. Perhaps this suggests that there are no clear answers, that the space of tension and negotiation is where the meaning lies.
This question was also explored through the context of their fractured relationship to place. Being a Kashmiri-Pakistani who cannot visit Kashmir because of intense political turbulence, Asghar looks at the space of the mountains in Kashmir to explore their grief of being unable to return to where they are from. While this is a theme we often see in diaspora writers, the nature of the grief and feeling of (dis)belonging is much more heightened when the home is completely inaccessible and plagued by war and military control. Kashmir’s mountains are known to be extremely beautiful and have become a space frequented by foreign tourists all over the world.
In this context, the space of the mountains in Kashmir act as a metaphor for Asghar to learn what healing could look like after being separated from family, land, language and experiences that were meant to be or could have been considered home. Their feeling of disconnection is evident from the first poem of the collection, an untitled poem that reads:
At the edge of an edge
Is an edge. At that edge
Is a cliff. Beyond that cliff
Is me.
At the heart of this collection lies a quiet, persistent ache: what does it actually mean to belong?
For most, the concept of “home” is treated as a transactional, concrete reality. We are taught to measure belonging through the lens of ownership — neatly packaged in property deeds, rental agreements, and passports. We anchor our identities to physical structures, to the soil of a country that claims us by birthright, and to the unbroken lineage of the parents who brought us into the world. We treat home as an inheritance, a default setting.
But for Fatimah Asghar, none of these are simple questions that have answers.
On paper, the collection is about how homecoming has been so deeply tied to heartbreak for Asghar, that they have almost no way of separating the two. It is about how it felt for them to return to a place that was the home of their parents. But more than anything to me, this collection is about grief for a life that could have been. Land and family are two important aspects of the grief depicted in the collection, and these two aspects are inherently connected.
One of the most striking moments in the collection for me was in the poem After Thirty Years, where Asghar reflects on inheriting parts of their mother and grandmother (daadi) in ways they never expected.
Your daadi had rings like yours
In her nose, my mother. One on
Either side, one in the middle.
Rings all up in her ears tooI fretted for months
Over the stars
In my face, wondering
if she would approve me, thinking
I charted my own life
Here, the piercings become a symbol of inherited identity, revealing that even the choices Asghar believed were entirely their own had unknowingly connected them to generations of women before them.
Throughout Daughter of the Mountains, Asghar wrestles with feeling disconnected from the people, language and culture that should have anchored their sense of self. Yet they discover that belonging can exist in unexpected, embodied ways. The image of the “stars” on their face transforms the piercings into constellations, suggesting that identity is something written onto the body long before we learn how to read it. The final line, “thinking I charted my own life,” gently unsettles the idea that identity is something we create entirely for ourselves. Instead, Asghar suggests that our lives are always shaped by histories that precede us, even when those histories have been fractured by migration, death and distance.
In many ways, this poem captures the emotional heart of the collection. Asghar spends much of Daughter of the Mountains searching for traces of home in landscapes, family stories and memories, only to discover that some of those traces have been with them all along. Rather than presenting belonging as something that can only be found by returning to Pakistan or reconnecting with family, the poem suggests that home can also be carried within the body itself. It is one of the collection’s quietest moments, but also one of its most hopeful, offering the possibility that even after profound loss, fragments of inheritance continue to endure.
In our interview, I asked Asghar how they felt that writing this collection answered questions they had about belonging and home. Rather than describing the collection as something that resolved these questions, they spoke about poetry as a way of staying with them. Home was not something the poems finally delivered to them, but something they continued to circle around through memory, language and image. That feels true to the collection itself. There is no triumphant return, no singular revelation waiting at the end of the journey. Instead, the poems make space for contradiction: for loving a place that cannot fully love you back, for mourning family while still longing for them, and for carrying an inheritance that is both comforting and painful. In this sense, the collection resists easy narratives of healing and instead asks what it means to live honestly within uncertainty.
As someone who has often found myself thinking about questions of home, family and belonging, Daughter of the Mountains resonated with me in deeply personal ways. Asghar’s poems reminded me that grief is not only about what has been lost, but also about the lives we imagine we might have lived had history unfolded differently. Throughout the collection, there is an ongoing mourning for relationships that were interrupted, places that became inaccessible and identities that were never allowed to fully take shape. Yet within that mourning there is also tenderness. The act of writing for Asghar is a way of preserving fragments that might otherwise disappear, allowing memory to exist even when certainty cannot.
Perhaps that is what makes Daughter of the Mountains such a remarkable collection. It does not offer belonging as a destination to be reached or heartbreak as something to be overcome. Instead, Asghar reveals how the two are often inseparable, each giving shape to the other. By the final poem, what remains is not a neat resolution but an invitation: to imagine home not as a place we inherit or return to unchanged, but as something we continuously make through memory, love, loss and the stories we choose to tell. It is a quiet, deeply generous collection that lingers for the reader.
