Elegy for My Tongue

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/ int...