I can only know my mother so well. I can listen to
stories, and try to map how they interact. I can
remember that apartment, the one we shared, albeit
through very different bodies. the landscapes she
was marred by, the potential in the trees—
otherwise I
pretend:

In Mina Khan’s debut collection Night Shift in Perfect English memory is an inheritance, a place, a story woven together with fragments, implications, and fabulations. Mina Khan is a poet, a cartographer of memory, and a neighbor inviting the reader to be both a witness and a participant as she charts migrations across land, decades, and relationships. Navigating through apartments, familial structures, desires, and wounds, Khan situates the reader in her neighborhood, in her homes, in her family’s deli. She holds the world out in front of us and turns it on its head: asking us to remember that it is round, asking us to bear witness to the ways time will unravel it.

and I lived there

Mina Khan wastes no time. Here, in the title of the opening poem, the reader is dropped into a lived in world, into a story that has already begun. The speaker wanders through fragments and maps out memories, just eyes and ears, inherently absorbent and readily committed to noticing. Khan asks the reader to feel nothing that she is not willing to feel with them, to endure nothing that she will not endure. A daughter of diaspora, a daughter of a mother: the speaker is no stranger to entering a story that has already begun. She drops the readers into the world, prepared to catch us.

The poet quickly establishes memory as a place that is expansive as it is inescapable. Her poems vary in forms and fragmentation, some pieces bound across the page while others hold themselves in a small fist. This variation allows the speaker to move through time, across living rooms, conversations, and countries without ever leaving the world we entered. Khan skillfully tethers the reader to something as intangible as memory with her use of photographs and script scenes: small stones scattered throughout the book.

In the first SCENE to appear in the collection Khan places the reader here,

centered is a gorgeous red Pakistani rug, pinned
down by two loveseats, still in their plastic cover
after twenty years of marriage. the overhead light
is cool white.
Her language is rich and efficient. She is quick to establish and adorn this world with beauty, violence, love, and history. There is something preserved, something sterile, something absent. Meanwhile the form

promises a story to be told, a performance to be rendered, and a part to be played. The speaker’s willingness to face pain is only matched by her willingness to be in awe. Throughout the work, the poet’s voice arrives and remains steady and clear, curious and observant, unassuming and brave. Khan’s voice serves a vital string gently woven through this cohesive collection. Her use of language is measured, literal, direct, and surprising: perfect English.

the dropping of a petal,
orange and dry. I am
almost twenty-four,
the age of mother’s first
miscarriage. I have her cheekbones
and full, sneering lips. a vase

In this collection of poems, grief is a fact, an inheritance, and it appears as grief so often does: suddenly. Khan understands how to make use of the page: white spaces hum loud with tension, a silence seeps across the room, language is forgotten or misunderstood, history is implied and hanging above. There are no holes in these poems, only absences that carry the shape of what once was. Every poem points to a world beyond the space being occupied, a world informing the one we are now in. Khan reminds the reader that there is a person around the corner, behind the counter, a person who held the seat before you, someone chose the paint on the walls. The poet will gesture towards the color that was once in the sky. She will remind you of the horizon, of your debt, your rising bills, and the water lapping at the lake’s edge all the same. Her clean cut diction gleams the absurdity in truth.

and remember the children? we still remember who they
were. before the courthouses, their legal name changes. we
remember where they learned to walk, learned to count coins.
in the stores, the ones before Amazon, Whole Foods… Seema,
Seunghyun, Imran, Irfan, Rehan, Jina….

Khan allows context to unmask violence. She sets the scene, positions the names and the people, her neighbors, as they inevitably fall under the weight of monopoly, of capitalism. She guides the reader through the gentrification of her neighborhood: through common violence. She works slowly, manipulates time, and reaches the poem across pages. She stretches sorrow, builds suspense, lengthens rage, you don’t know when it will end. You almost get used to it, but you never do. In this collection of poems pain is as tended to as sweetness and Khan offers little without relief.

autumn is rolling in
the early patter of rain
round bodies glad to meet at the pavement.
to give way
to the heft
of the evergreen sky

A lake, a mosquito, a season, a mother: in this collection, there is no movement that arrives without the acknowledgement of desire. When a cicada enters the poem you will be reminded of its mouth. Khan will call on you to notice that there are two lives here. Two mouths. Two needs. Even in fragments, even while working with a material as slippery as memory, Khan is able to craft a round and layered world. The author skillfully navigates memory without getting swallowed by the cerebral or struggling to conquer it. In this collection, Khan allows everything to be a teacher: the lake, the grandmother, the embarrassment, the tree, memory is no exception. She adheres to its varying shapes and contradictions, its pace and interruptions. In this stunning debut poetry collection, Mina Khan crafts a world that is rich and full of promises. She paints the day as tender as it is violent as it is ours.

*

Dylan Gilbert is a Brooklyn based writer, curator, and educator from the Midwest. She holds her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and serves as an editor-at-large at Milk Press. Dylan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Maine Review, Black Warrior Review, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere.

Mina Khan is a Korean-Pakistani American poet from NYC, based currently out of Chicago. Her writing spans across nations, generations, to discuss ecology, cyclicality, violence, tenderness, and the everyday. Her work has appeared in AAWW’s The Margins, Tupelo Quarterly, Epiphany Magazine, and more. Khan holds a BA from Wesleyan University, MFA from Columbia University, and is a Tin House alum. Her debut, Night Shift in Perfect English, is out now.