After by Fatimah Asghar (review)

Fatimah Asghar’s first chapbook of poetry, After, contains all of the energy and imagination, as well as ability with craft, that one could hope for. Asghar is a nationally touring poet, a teacher at Young Chicago Authors, and a candidate in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, so it seems it should go without saying that her poetry is top-notch, yet, going in with these heightened expectations, I was still consistently amazed.

The book begins with a seemingly biographical poem, “Drown,” a piece about “the last memory I will ever have of my father.” Even here, we see partway through that “the sinks in the house have become mouths / laughing, lips wide. All the walls are tongues licking.” Already the spark of imagination that brings me to poetry over and over again is at play here. And this spark intertwines with a somber tone, that of “the artery my father will die from in three weeks.” The poet is able to connect what might otherwise become facile surrealism with a sincere core, and this combination of contemplative energy and emotional grounding carries throughout the book.

In other poems, this energy turns more grotesque. In a piece like “Playroom,” the author’s imagination reflects the biases she experiences in the world onto her toys. The narrator identifies with her Beanie Babies because she never “had more than one beanie baby / per species. they were rarer that way […] no one with skin like theirs, freaks / like me” (emphasis original). The playroom, for the child whom the reader presumes is as least a reflection of the South Asian-American author, is “the only place / i could be white.” Here, the child plays out acts of rape, colonization, and destruction, the Barbie dolls having sex with the Beanie Babies, “the legions of identical / white women […] conquering / each animal one limb at a time.”

While some of the poems in this book make use of consistent stanza length, including “Monophobia,” a haunting pantoum that shows up early on, it’s Asghar’s experimentation with forms that impresses. From poems that move all across the page to those built with layered text, one layer being semi-transparent and the other sitting at an angle, there are myriad ways the writer plays with the words on the page. But these are never shortcuts to a completed poem. The form is often an extension of content, such as in “Medusa’s Apology,” a piece written in a single footnote, and the writer never loses the physicality and wondrousness found in her imagery in favor of these other elements of craft. For example, in the poem, “Panic,” the image of “a little man who may or may not look like a spider who crawls through my ear when I’m sleeping” is as striking as the physical layering and arrangement of the poem on the page.

The most original and effective form found in this book, at least to this reader, is the “Partial Index of Lies I Have Told My Sister,” a poem constructed to look like an actual index at the end of a book. The poem begins with “Borrow / Book from her; 2, 5, 8, 22, 27, 31,” but it soon transitions to things like “Condom, I used a” and “Health / Did not have infections.” Not only does the poem raise its stakes throughout, arriving near the end at explicit rape, but it appears that, additionally, Asghar has listed the page numbers for this index with intention. Some of these lies share the same page or are one to two pages away, and connecting these while paying attention to the page numbers that share headers creates a kind of web. This isn’t simply an entertaining side-game though; with proper attention, these connections reveal the non-linear relationships between memories, how meaning can be constructed or discovered, and how the narrator has changed over time. This poem reminds the reader that nothing we do or that happens to us is an isolated incident.

Worth noting also is the figure of Medusa that appears...