About this item
Highlights
- In Saba Husain's Elegy for My Tongue, the everyday is always in conversation with the enormous-with the complexities of immigration, national identity, mortality, language and faith.
- Author(s): Saba Husain
- 112 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
About the Book
In Saba Husain's Elegy for My Tongue, the everyday is always in conversation with the enormous-with the complexities of immigration, national identity, mortality, language and faith.
Book Synopsis
In Saba Husain's Elegy for My Tongue, the everyday is always in conversation with the enormous-with the complexities of immigration, national identity, mortality, language and faith. The simplicity of a grandmother helping her grandson study for a test becomes a meditation on family history, discovering how "paper remembers a steaming cup of black tea/ with cardamom and milk, / and the glide of a fountain pen." Or a clothesline whipping in the wind, "flinging clothes stiff from the sun/ into the air like/ mammoth butterflies," leads to the knowledge of the private self within the enormity of family and history, the self that almost wants to be revealed. This book spans nations and languages, generations, and the tiniest moments of insight and discovery. Saba Husain writes with musical intelligence, with grace and clarity that seem almost effortless. This is a terrific book, one that I will return to with pleasure.
- Kevin Prufer, The Fears
Review Quotes
Saba Husain's deft, dexterous new book of poems, Elegy for My Tongue, glides across a vast landscape where the past, present, and future dwell side-by-side. Like family photographs hanging on a wall-though taken years apart, we experience them all at once. In myriad forms and often deceptively simple statements, she explores lived, collective, and thwarted memories in compressed language that changes direction like a flock of starlings. I was especially knocked out by her sweeping range of diction-from the classic and formal to the familial and colloquial.
- Jennifer Knox, Crushing It
From Lahore to Texas, tradition to adaptation, and memory to discernment, Saba Husain's poetry celebrates the persistence of one's spirit in a world of turmoil and harshness. From the legacy of grandparents to the wondering of grandchildren, the poet gives us an entire world, exquisitely rendered with humility, precision, and artfulness.
-Ron Slate, Joy Ride