Daughter of the Mountains

poems of heartbreak & homecoming

By: Fatimah Asghar

Narrated by: Fatimah Asghar

A tender, searching collection that breaks open notions of faith to ask how a daughter, alienated from kin, can find love and a home in the world, from the award-winning author of If They Come for Us and When We Were Sisters

at the edge of an edge
is an edge. at that edge
is a cliff. beyond that cliff
is me.

Exiled from ancestral homelands, how can one find a place for themself in the world? In this stunning sophomore collection, the acclaimed poet Fatimah Asghar unweaves residual grief to reckon with their relationship to Allah, long-estranged but deeply loved kin, the landscape of their ancestors, and love itself.

In meditative poems, Daughter of the Mountains grapples with multiple facets of fulfillment, betrayal, love, loss, and longing, illustrating how place, lineage, and environment inform the practice of spirituality and vice versa. With wisps of humor, imagery that is as beautiful as it is startling, and powerfully disruptive formal invention, this is an intimately lyrical and explosive collection.

Critic reviews

“From multihyphenate powerhouse Fatimah Asghar comes this marvelous collection that is part record of return, part diary of exits, part travelogue, and all soul. In poems dripping with God, magic, family, and nature, we are welcomed alongside the poet as they transverse landscapes of time, love, grief, and richly complex understandings of home. Like its name promises, this stunning book proves once again that Asghar is a giant, tremendous in skill and heart.”—Danez Smith, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Bluff

“There is, in Daughter of the Mountains, an almost supernatural sense of connectedness, compassion. Fatimah Asghar’s work shows us how love persists through violence, history, cruelty, malice, not in spite of those obstacles but because of them. Asghar insists on rehabilitation of the world beginning with rehabilitation of one’s own heart. It’s a blueprint and a manifesto. I sit in stunned gratitude at its guidance.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

“Oh my gods. This BOOK. It’s doing the damn THING! This book brings the medicine river down to our heart feet. It brings the mountains to us.”—esperanza spalding

“Asghar’s Daughter of the Mountains cuts with gleaming clarity, its language at once sharp and luminous. Asghar writes with a devotional precision—each line honed to reveal something tender and true beneath it. The poems move through landscapes of memory, migration, family, and faith, where the sacred and the everyday blur together by design.”—Hala Alyan, author of The Moon That Turns You Back