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 –"



Rakhshan Rizwan works as an Acquisitions Editor. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Utrecht University. Her poetry pamphlet, Paisley (The Emma Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award and the Michael Marks Poetry Prize. Her collection of children's poetry, My Sneezes are Perfect (The Emma Press, 2021) documents the difficulties of moving countries, and living through a pandemic from the perspective of a young child. Her book Kashmiri Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure, and the Local Cosmopolitan (Routledge, 2020) looks at how Kashmiri authors use innovative languages of happiness to do human rights advocacy. Her writing has appeared in Aaduna, Nimrod, Postcolonial Text and Blue Lyra Review, among others. She is on the editorial team of the children's poetry journal Tyger Tyger Magazine. She is from Lahore, Pakistan, has lived in Germany and the Netherlands, and currently lives in the Bay Area of North California, US.