Review: "Daughter of the Mountains" by Fatimah Asghar

Daughter of the Mountains by Fatimah Asghar
Published July 2026 via One World
★★★★

Poems of homeland and family and love lost.

This is a fairly wide-ranging collection, drifting from mountain yearnings to observations on history and homeland to more maybe more expected reflections on relationships that have seen better days.

My favourite pieces here are about homeland and history, my favourite lines about yearning for the mountains. The poem [the women in my family] talks about names lost to time: women's names, that is; only the winds & only the mountains / keep them. we've forgotten the names, writes Asghar (24*). This year I sat down with my in-laws and asked for as much family history, as many names, as they could tell me; the men's names stretched back generations, but the women's names (many of which had been changed in marriage, anyway) had been lost to time. (One of those things that transcends culture, I think: Men's names hang on and women's names drop off the page.)

Another poem, [other life], tells itself in reverse, and if I'm going to pick apart one of these poems on my own time it's going to be this one—I love a bit of structural play in poetry, a bit of the unexpected. The poems about romance (and romance lost) didn't work as well for me, less because of facility with language and more because those are themes I see a lot of in contemporary poetry, but the range here means that a lot of readers will find something of interest.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.