Crosslight for Youngbird

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.

"Wadud marks the realities of inequality within empire"—Publishers Weekly"An affecting debut collection"—Library Journal"Searching, extroverted, and humane, yet concerns itself with the misery, doubt, and confusion of forced exodus and unwelcome borders"—Austin Adams, LARB"While lyric in construction, these poems comprise documentary work, telling and reiterating the truth of the cruelties people exact on other people, bringing to light that, like war, a border is a human construct.—Kimberley Grey, On the Seawall"Crosslight turns all its voltage on this relationship between the privilege we may mistake for freedom and the oppression it is in fact."—Rachael Guynn Wilson, Kenyon ReviewAccording 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 WhiteThe aching beauty of Crosslight for Youngbird by Asiya Wadud will slay you ten times over. Her sentences fill up the mouth like water. The water is an invasive storm that refuses to relent, overwhelming our whole senses of self–these (mostly) prose poems, looping and voluminous and necessarily incantatory like a prayer. To hold a whole world of loss is as impossible as the realities behind the poems themselves. Yet, impossibly, Wadud, like Laszlo Krasznahorkai, makes a demanding syntax that strokes those loss-wounds, inflames them, and becomes soft balm. Crosslight for Youngbird is phenomenal. It is like no other book I’ve ever read. It will leave you breathless.—Dawn Lundy MartinThis strong and sensitive book, Crosslight for Youngbird, by Asiya Wadud is crafted, timely, caring. Now, when we may feel overwhelmed with the litany of painful stories about our most vulnerable in the world everyday, Asiya’s poems offer us a way in. This heartfelt work presents a more profound understanding of the harmed, resilient, resigned. Wadud’s sparse, immersive language puts questions into high relief: “What would we do if we found ourselves lost?”, “What would we do if we found ourselves?—Tracie Morris