Praises and Reviews
Amatan Noor's debut chapbook “Not Guilty” is a revelatory exploration of what it means to grapple with legacy. Those of pain, those of love, those of dislocation and return. What do we make with the fragments we inherit, with the stories we are left with? Noor is steadfast in her scrutiny of different histories, those of land and people alike. "We know to burn the abuse into the backs of our skulls," she writes and, later: "I answer all the questions asked of me." But the answering itself is an act of reclamation, a rewriting herself into narratives of surveillance and erasure. With humor, with heart, with a steady gaze, Noor gives us alternate narratives. They are a reprieve and a benediction all at once.
-Hala Alyan, author of The Arsonist’s City and The Twenty Ninth Year
These poems feature a fearless blues and melodic lattice of memoir. Scenes that oscillate between mind and gut through Noor’s gift for image and insight. Poems’ virtuosic further in that this music comes while she maintains a revolutionary altitude for analysis of political economy. This collection is right on epochal time; scaffolding for the humanity to come.
-Tongo Eisen-Martin, Poet Laureate of San Francisco
“I have learned/it is better to observe,” writes Amatan Noor, and it is this poet’s keen and omnipresent observations that propel these poems from mere arrangements of words, into vivid and dynamic portraits. I love this poet’s insistence on affixing everyday encounters beside large and sweeping metaphysical questions. Noor refuses to leave anything out or behind—I am grateful for this poet’s ferocity and generosity.
-Tarfia Faizullah, author of Seam and Registers of Illuminated Villages
Amatan Noor pens a Brown girl’s anthem, a survivor’s song, a lesson on womanhood and loneliness and so much more. Not Guilty gives us a glimpse into a Bangladeshi woman’s existence in America. Noor is choosing liberation over others’ expectations. Her writing is packed with imagery and genuine emotion cautioning readers at turns. This is a calling out of perpetrators of violence and a calling in of self. Noor’s debut offers a mourning of loved ones, love lost and past iterations of self while calling each to account for their actions.
-Roya Marsh, author of DayliGht
Not Guilty is Amatan Noor’s unapologetic poetic endeavor for deliverance. Narratives of legacy, love, solitude, grief and displacement pulsate between origin stories and conjurings that revolt against despair. Trekking through cosmic intergenerational trauma and volatilities of land, Noor declares a reclamation of the body and the self. Poems spring from post-partition East Bengal, to a New Jersey Criminal Courthouse, to cascading cities across Europe and the Middle East where Noor collects soulful mementos and lessons on perseverance. This debut collection embraces one’s inner turmoil while birthing stanzas as balms of convalescence
A striking tale of survivorship, migration, heartbreaks and joy with grit at its core. Not Guilty is a tenacious continuation of the self, past tragedies of catastrophic scope in unfamiliar terrains.