Crosslight for Young Bird

by Asiya Wadud

Overview

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 HURSTON/WRIGHT AWARD

An urgent and vital debut collection of poems that mixes ekphrasis with reportage to draw a new narrative of our present-day migration crises

Crosslight for Youngbird explores the slipperiness of borders, as well as borders’ tentacles: mother tongue, language and mastery, citizenship and nationality, migration and flight. These poems are concerned with the demands we make on our body, the limits of those demands, and ultimately, how everyone inhabits space.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937658878
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	10/02/2018
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

ASIYA WADUD is a writer and third grade teacher. She is the author of the chapbook we, too, are but the fold. Every Wednesday, she teaches English to new immigrants and refugees. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

What People are Saying About This

Simone White

“According to the principles of the distribution of light, or, God’s will, a person interested in the future must account for each flicker or movement of the enclosures that engage and separate us from and with one another. Asiya’s work takes, indeed, a bird’s eye view. I think it is possible to believe in the invocation of the wide view.”

Editorial Reviews

11/05/2018
Born of a colonial legacy—“lineage of slave marooned”—this wildly associative debut from Wadud works as a lyrical introduction to the phenomenology of border-crossing. By truck and boat, on foot and in the mind, beyond “the long arm of empire,” the journeys recorded here are harrowing, even lethal. A poem of witness may begin as a prayer for safe journey, and turn to elegy as “doom and resolve each keep their own metronome.” A lifeboat capsizes in the Mediterranean; families of refugees asphyxiate in a sealed truck en route to Austria. What keep the book from becoming a catalog of unremitting horror are Wadud’s capacious heart, inventive mind, and diasporic imagination: “when a country doesn’t claim you, just gather your own.” Her versatile forms convey “the exhilaration of life/ out of place.” Optimistically reversing Stevie Smith’s famous line, “Not waving but drowning,” Wadud writes, “I’m not sinking, I’m floating.” In its drawing together of disparate postcolonial experiences, the book conveys an ominous subtext: “don’t be so sure the river flows downstream. Truth be we maybe all long for the same long.” Even as Wadud marks the realities of inequality within empire, she delivers a universal message: “We’re all bobbing creatures amniotic salted on this island of deserted windmills.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

According to the principles of the distribution of light, or, God’s will, a person interested in the future must account for each flicker or movement of the enclosures that engage and separate us from and with one another. Asiya’s work takes, indeed, a bird’s eye view. I think it is possible to believe in the invocation of the wide view.” —Simone White

From the Publisher

09/15/2018
"A baby be damned without a mother. A mother be damned without her child. A man be damned without a country. A country be damned without a people." That's Omar speaking, ready to risk a Mediterranean crossing, for "the salted seas preserve a dream." Martin responds by warning him with a story about liberated Buchenwald inmates whose starved bodies sometimes couldn't withstand K-Rations: "So close to liberation and some empire licks back." A third-grade teacher in Brooklyn who also instructs new immigrants and refugees in English, Wadud readily references language mashups and lost lives (71 people asphyxiated in a truck, 3,771 drowned), all forming a veritable "palimpsest marking some memory." Yet she speaks not just of hard crossings and hard adaptation but the longing for community, recalling Omar's salt-preserved dream. "We three are a small nation," she cries as her sister teaches her to float, even if the water recalls darker murmurings. And the title's Youngbird says, "So pass through a ready sieve some what you need to make a little country by the supple, giving sea." VERDICT An affecting debut collection.

Library Journal