With Daughter of the Mountains, award-winning author Fatimah Asghar expands on the correlation between self and place that permeated their debut collection, If They Come for Us. There is less attention to structural innovation, a decision that helps Asghar to center the deeply vulnerable experience of self-actualization from numerous angles in ways that prove more accessible to general readers without sacrificing Asghar’s distinct voice on the page.
Daughters of the Mountains is organized into five sections: daughter of [the return], daughter of [hope], daughter of [border], daughter of [pain], and daughter of [dirt]. The brackets included in each section signal the core thematic exploration of each section, while also priming readers to interrogate Asghar’s varying use of brackets across the collection, used to frame everything from poem titles to idiomatic translations. With the first section, Asghar develops a narrative arc that further explores themes of civil war, displacement, and lineage, all core themes from their first collection.
As readers might expect, this first section features a speaker who has returned to the country of their parents in an attempt to reconnect with family and the parents they never truly knew. The section opens with a sense of unbelonging as the speaker navigates their connection to the land of their family. In “[when i ask the mountains],” for example, the speaker explains, “where am i from? i ask the mountains. / you are a daughter, they say. you are / our daughter.” As the section continues, Asghar grapples with cultural and familial practices that obscure women from their history, noting how there are “still no names of the women before // me” in the poem “[the women in my family]” before further highlighting how their father, though not the eldest, “is rewritten / as so. before him, there were two, girls, nameless” in the poem “[my father was not the eldest].”
In the first section, Asghar also introduces several forms of erasure which function as structural commentary on gaps in memory and familial histories. These methods prove integral throughout the collection, effectively rooting each aspect of self-discovery through the shared experience of incompleteness. This manifests most concertedly in “[still life, interrupted by border],” a poem from the third section of the collection. Asghar separates the poem into three sections, each of which approaches the same block of prose in a different way.
The first of the three sections features a prose poem in which numerous dozens of words and phrases have been replaced with “[BORDER],” while the second of the three sections inverts this by blacking out all text except for the various instances of “[BORDER].” The final section offers the block of prose in its entirety, giving readers context for the gaps of the preceding sections. Notably, each section carries a subtitle that further highlights the tone created by Asghar’s approach to textuality: “what is is not what always was,” “what was lost, what wants,” and “what was & could be, again,” respectively.
Though many of the poems in Daughter of the Mountains reflect Asghar’s continued exploration of their cultural and familial history, Asghar also infuses the collection with a second arc that centers an intimate relationship from its early stages to its end. Readers first encounter this thread in the second section of the book, “daughter of [hope].” Appropriately, the earliest poems feature lovers who lose themselves in wonder, such as how the speaker’s lover “caught / a butterfly once but didn’t know what to feed it // so [they] trapped it in a jar & gave it to a girl.” These poems are the most universally resonant and accessible, indubitably reminding readers of the wild abandon that so frequently characterizes new love. “my days with you fill with new knowing; / the crumbs that gather on the right side / of your mustache, waiting to be licked,” the speaker ruminates in the opening lines to “[orange].”
Asghar situates this romantic arc alongside poems that consider the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, both globally and among their closest friends. This juxtaposition helps to highlight the overwhelming sense of relief and connection the speaker experiences with their lover, as well as the hard ache of forced isolation and a lack of physical comfort. “[in the country where hugs are banned],” for example, presents a speaker who laments, “it’s unfair that today / of all days, the whole country is grounded // we are not allowed out, not allowed to gather / in your bright & instead click the link sent / to each of us.” Asghar expertly draws readers in with images and sentiments that pervaded quarantine for many across the world, a decision that ultimately allows readers a window into the larger sense of isolation with which the speaker in Daughter of the Mountains lives.
Fatimah Asghar demonstrates their keen awareness of global politics, a unique perspective on living in diaspora, and the full breadth of a love that both saves and destroys throughout Daughter of the Mountains. This collection reminds readers that Asghar excels across genres, and reimagines Asghar’s poetic voice in ever more vulnerable ways. While it may not prioritize structural or technical innovation as heavily as If They Come for Us, this collection feels particularly poignant and generous in the present moment.
POETRY
Daughter of the Mountains
By Fatimah Asghar
One World
Published July 7, 2026
