This stunning folio of poems by Mina Khan opens with the staccato rhythm of “I am every mirror,” to a world where breaking, violence, and incompleteness bend our perception of life. Khan teaches us to think about “what it is to be a child / on [one’s] own / small earth.” In Khan’s poems, masochism manifests as a consequence of “the refusal or inability / to articulate / desire,” and invites the reader to consider pleasure and want when bodies are punctured and “filtered through another’s body.” I admire deeply how in Khan’s poetry, home is found everywhere, but it is also precarious, as in a foreign shore, the taste of an ashtray, or floating particles in a lightbeam.
Mina Khan is a Korean-Pakistani American poet from New York, currently based in Chicago. Her work spans across nations, generations, to discuss the role of the woman, cyclicality, violence, tenderness, and the everyday. She was awarded an honorary mention by the American Academy of Poets and authored the chapbook, MON-monuments, monarchs & monsters (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2020.) She holds an MFA from Columbia University, and has been featured in Epiphany Magazine, Passengers Journal, Pigeon Pages, the Margins, and more.