Field Guide for End Days by Nishat Ahmed

Like many of the attendants and psychopomps encountered in myth and literature, the speaker in Field Guide for End Days wastes no time asking readers: Assalamualaikum. Why have you come? And the only correct answer is: because the world is on fire everything is on fire the bombs are on fire. In this deeply moving collection, Nishat Ahmed at first seems to be singing elegies for violence, oppression, and uncountable deaths in America as in the world at large. But pay closer attention, because what he’s really trying to do is point in the direction of the only things that still have the capacity to home and shelter. These poems give us the gift of our names before our mothers named us. They give us amulets against forgetting: mustard oil and cumin seed, the turmeric stains of domestic labor; the flash of humble tin roofs unbowed by stars, and dreams of all our ancients, consoling us back into breathing.

–Luisa A. Igloria, author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask, and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser

Field Guide for End Days is a warning, a handbook for those wandering toward the departed. A lovesong for the missed and missing, the everpresent and undersung, in this collection Ahmed takes what our ancestors have given us and lets it rest on our tongue. It begins by challenging the rhetoric echoing around us in the present when it breathes “God wanted us in America” to those coming from afar. But what life tethered to the distant won’t suffer from hunger, from lost language like prayer, from the difficulty we’ve courted by not listening to the histories of others? Traversing the universe and body next to you, the “heart is both/ a wreck and wreckage,” but the poems herein sing to the lost and lonely-hearted, asking what have we sacrificed for this life and where will it carry us?

–Remica Bingham-Risher, author of What We Ask of Flesh and Starlight & Error

A collection of poems is a long look into another’s eyes and, if we are unafraid, a daring look into our own.  Field Guide for End Days is a desperate and beautiful book that asks us not to blink when facing those things that define our time on Earth—love, family, history, death.  I think we read poetry as a way out of distraction and into our lives.  Nishat Ahmed’s new work reminds us to remember that all is never lost except through forgetfulness.  This is a book that revels in both the radiance of language and the complicated integrity of the heart.

–Tim Seibles, author of One Turn Around The Sun