Europe, Love Me Back

Europe, Love Me Back is a collection of relentlessly questing, sharply satirical poems about the continent, and the poet's fraught relationship with it. Hurting yet clear-eyed, Rizwan explores and exposes what it means to be a small brown woman in Dutch suburbs, hospitals and academia. This is an angry love letter, to a place left behind yet always there, continuing to matter and hurt and shape the poet's identity.

But no one was interested in eliciting my testimony; after all I wasn’t dead – I wasn’t ill – and hadn’t this country treated me so well? For it is not a human right to be much more than Agamben’s bare life, to exist in the hallowed halls of the academe, because there comes a point when our wanting is simply too much, obscene –