This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Fatimah Asghar, whose poetry collection Daughter of the Mountains is out today from One World. “oh, i always love / where we left the most, the place that begs / to be remembered,” Asghar muses. Across Daughter of the Mountains, they grapple with love, loss, lineage, and searching for a place in the world when you are very far away from the family and land that were once home. Through it all, they play with form and imagery, engaging mountains and sunlight and songs and Allah to produce a collection that is at turns humorous and elegiac. “Asghar’s work doesn’t just advocate for and agitate toward a more loving and sensate world, it somehow conjures scale models of that world for us,” Kaveh Akbar said of Daughter of the Mountains, while esperanza spalding praised the collection for “doing the damn THING!” Fatimah Asghar is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are the writer and cocreator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls, the coeditor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and the author of the poetry collection If They Come For Us (One World, 2018), the novel When We Were Sisters (One World, 2023), and the chapbook After (YesYes Books, 2015).
Fatimah Asghar, author of Daughter of the Mountains. (Credit: Ciera Dunbar)
1. How long did it take you to write Daughter of the Mountains?
The oldest poems in this collection are from 2018 or 2019. But after If They Come For Us, I wasn’t writing poetry as much as I had been before. I was writing other things, my first novel, When We Were Sisters, and screenwriting things, but poetry was coming out of me less. Then, I took a trip to Pakistan in 2024—the first time that I had been since my dad died when I was a child—and came back and instantly wrote forty poems in thirty days. That became the core of Daughter of the Mountains. I finished it fully in the fall of 2025, so it felt like the bulk of it was concentrated in two years, even though there are poems that are much older than that in the collection.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The book feels significantly different than If They Come For Us. As a second book, it’s interesting when you’re writing in a way that feels true to your current voice, but that voice feels very different from the work that you’ve created before. I think that’s quite natural in the grand scheme of things—If They Come For Us came out in 2018, it’s been eight years since I’ve released a collection of poetry. I’ve lived many lives since that book, some of which are included in Daughter of the Mountains. But as an artist, it’s easy to compare yourself to your younger self, instead of giving yourself the freedom to be who you are now.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For poetry,I often write in the mornings, after meditating. I like doing it when my mind is clear and feeling like I’m allowing the words to come to me. For a long time I was very disciplined about that—writing first thing in the morning. I always considered myself a morning writer. But nowthat’s shifted. I was just at Civitella Ranieri last month and I was working on my next novel. I was surprised by how I wasn’t just a morning writer, given the right time and structure I wrote in the mornings, the afternoons, the evenings, somet imes in the dead of night. I love writing. It moves me. Given enough space and time, it is what I would be doing all the time.
4. What are you reading right now?
I just finished rereading Jazz (Knopf, 1992) by Toni Morrison. I’m working through Aracelis Girmay’s new poetry collection Green of All Heads (BOA Editions, 2025) slowly, savoring each poem.
5. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book?
The earliest poem I have in this collection is a poem called “i don’t know what will kill us first: the race war or what we’ve done to this earth,” and I wrote that after being on a date with someone I had a huge crush on, when we went to the park after he had played basketball and we were talking. In that poem, I talk about a butterfly sanctuary that was by an old apartment of mine when I lived in Pilsen [a neighborhood in Chicago]. I loved that garden, I loved going.
6. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
I organized the book by thinking of wanting to bring the readers on an emotional journey through the book. So, the first section is called “daughter of [the return]” and is a lot about what it was like coming to Pakistan and meeting my dad’s family for the first time in thirty years. It grapples a lot with loss of family, grief, separation, and reunion. Getting to know the land of the stories of my family for myself. That whole section was written after my first trip to Pakistan. The second section, “daughter of [hope],” continues that while also exploring falling in love—in love with a romantic interest, in love with my friends, in love with the world in whatever ways possible. The third section, “daughter of [border],” deals with some of the sticky parts of the world. Current events, simultaneous genocides, watching people separate into ‘us’ and ‘them’ and praying for kindness, for relief. The next section, “daughter of [pain],” explores the breakup of a relationship that I thought I was going to be in forever. And the last section, “daughter of [dirt],” opens that breakup into a more spiritual, ancestral, and land-based searching. How the grief allowed me to open into the soil in a different way; how I needed my ancestral homeland to help me with my pain and into forgiveness.
7. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book?
I traveled so often to Pakistan while writing this book; I had a grant from the Asian Cultural Council and so was able to spend a significant time there. I’m going to miss that—organizing my life to be able to prioritize a connection to my homeland, being able to explore, being able to deepen into that terrain.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Daughter of the Mountains, what would you say?
Oh man. I would say: Don’t date that person. Don’t put your heart there. Misery, baby. Misery. And you deserve more.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Daughter of the Mountains?
I was working on a documentary when I was in Pakistan, so filmmaking and collage-based film work were really instrumental to the collection and creation of the book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Honestly, there’s nothing more important than doing your work. You can talk about the work, you can read, you can spend so long trying to chase some deep knowledge that will give you the key—but all of that, ultimately, can become its own distraction if you let it. There is no substitute for doing the work. You just have to do it, even on hard days, even when it’s the last thing that you want to do. My friend, Safia Elhillo, said this to me about prayer once. She said she asks herself, ‘do I want to be a person who prayed today, or who thought about praying?’ I think that extends to writing. Do I want to be a person who wrote today, or who thought about writing? Ask yourself that. Then answer.
