I knew embarrassingly little about Partition and learned a lot. Asghar has an amazing capacity to write from lifetimes and perspectives that are not her own as if they truly were. It felt as if she had lived and was writing out of several different lives at once. I look forward to lots more from her.

I had trouble focusing on this collection. There didn’t see me to be a unifying theme and the style was a bit inaccessible. I felt like my reading would have been enhanced if I had read it in a college English class, where we could discuss the meaning line by line. As it was I found some lines really powerful, but caught myself skimming rather than reading a lot. I think that is a reflection of the type of poetry I prefer (straightforward, minimalist) more than anything else.

Solomon’s treatment of gender, sexuality, race, class, and neurodiversity is phenomenal. They don’t pause to explain or clarify any of it. You just have to catch up or be left behind and I loved that. Their way of confronting our tendency to put things in boxes permeates the entire story. The on and off pacing slowed the story down for me a bit, but overall I was enthralled. Very excited to see where Solomon goes from here.