Elegy for My Tongue

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In Saba Husain's Elegy for My Tongue, the everyday is always in conversation with the enormous-with the complexities of immigration, national identity, mortality, language and faith. The simplicity of a grandmother helping her grandson study for a test becomes a meditation on family history, discovering how "paper remembers a steaming cup of black tea/ with cardamom and milk, / and the glide of a fountain pen." Or a clothesline whipping in the wind, "flinging clothes stiff from the sun/ into the air like/ mammoth butterflies," leads to the knowledge of the private self within the enormity of family and history, the self that almost wants to be revealed. This book spans nations and languages, generations, and the tiniest moments of insight and discovery. Saba Husain writes with musical intelligence, with grace and clarity that seem almost effortless. This is a terrific book, one that I will return to with pleasure.

• Kevin Prufer, The Fears