Books | Mina Khan

2024 Winner of the Two Languages Book Award

Mina Khan’s debut collection Night Shift in Perfect English is a tender, album-like retelling of the immigrant family post-American Dream. Drawing upon her Korean-Pakistani heritage, Khan discusses the NYC bodega in a gentrifying neighborhood, the aging body, and a rapidly deteriorating climate; Everyday violences-and the vivid joys that persevere.

PRAISE FOR Night Shift in Perfect English

“In Mina Khan’s Night Shift in Perfect English, the past, present, and future meld into one spinning time. In ‘american dream,’ the poet writes: ‘I never thought/this would happen./that I would die/as I was born.’ In Night Shift in Perfect English, the speaker’s family, landscape, history, and country are all under careful watch, as in ‘what we have done,’ where ‘the world is a collection of scenes. violent/teals. a prophet formed/of sea foam.’ The speaker in these sharp and thoughtful poems has the keenest eye, like a hawk across history, across generations.”

Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World

“‘[T]here is always an after to the American Dream,’ Mina Khan writes, in this glimmering debut that traces the labors, desires, and aches of one’s childhood home, those moments in which one sees one’s parents as the flawed humans that they are, and to also recognize one’s own resemblance to them: ‘I look like my mother, sobbing / in her yellow gloves.’ These poems pay tribute to one’s working class immigrant mother; they are snapshots in time, ‘Umma and Papa their stool by the radio’ interspersed with familial photographs (and their spectral altered forms), alongside poems that masquerade as sections from a screenplay. For Khan, the poem is a looking glass, fractured mirrors in which we can see tenderly the past and the present all at once—her lyric is fine etching that lingers with me still."

Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures

“When using an analog camera, if you take two or more photographs without advancing the film, you compose what is called a multiple exposure. Scenes overlay and are visible in a single frame. The visual effect is spectral and distressed. Things that should appear solid often seem in motion, not unlike memory, not unlike trauma or bliss. This is what it feels like to read Mina Khan’s phenomenal debut. Events, locations, bodies, unspoken mother tongues, violences at varying scales, and even simple nourishing pleasures overlay and are exposed through Khan’s seeing voice. These are poems swarming with life and intimacy. They are the memory of a changing borough and body. They ask, how does one remain oneself within the contortions that America forces? What does it mean to be becoming a woman surviving men, the intricacies of love, and assimilation? Something slick and unspeakable glitches the syntax. A mosquito hovers above the warmth of the line. Life is lived in the spectrum between tenderness and cruelty, memory and time, unfolding. Khan’s writing is lucid, fully embodied, bold and unflinching. These are exquisite poems.”

Danielle Vogel, author of A Library of Light

MON (monuments, monarchs & monsters)

(Sputnik & Fizzle, 2020)

Trauma molds the collective memory that Mina Khan's poems relay in this chapbook of poetry, interlacing autobiographical examination with the rigor of researched fact. These poems rupture through a generational understanding between mother, father, and child, and rekindle old symbols through the ashes of contemporary seeing. If ancestry leads the poet toward massacre and war-torn worlds, MON's stunning autofictions recover the flaked past within living monuments.