Hana Saad Interviews Mina Khan
Mina Khan is a Korean-Pakistani American poet from NYC. Her writing spans across nations, generations, to discuss ecology, cyclicality, violence, tenderness, and the everyday. Her work has appeared in AAWW’s The Margins, Tupelo Quarterly, Epiphany Magazine, and more. Khan holds a BA from Wesleyan University, MFA from Columbia University, and is a Tin House alum.
From Nonfiction Editor Hana Saad: Night Shift in Perfect English is a debut collection that wrestles with the intangible—memory, loss, legacy—and truths that are often hard to speak about. Khan’s debut, which also incorporates visual art, takes a sharp look at the relationship between immigration, the myth of the American Dream, and gentrification. This collection moves between changing landscapes, familial stories, and musings about the stark reality of life, considering gentleness and violence in equal measure. Khan often lands on the minutiae in this collection: yellow flowers, a puddle, a mosquito resting on skin. I sat down with Khan in a Zoom call, where we spent an hour chatting about the collection, her writing process, and how she navigates writing from two cultures as a Korean-Pakistani American.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hana Saad: Hello, Mina! You already had a chapbook out in the world–MON (monuments, monarchs & monsters)! How was the process for the collection similar or different to creating and publishing the chapbook? How did you settle on the themes you wanted to write about? Did you expand upon the chapbook?
Mina Khan: All my titles have been super long. I love long titles. It's not very me, it just happened. The processes were completely different. So, for MON, I wrote that as my college thesis, and it was during a time when I was doing a lot of research into Japanese imperialism, and I was writing poems based off of that. The book uses archival documents and a mix of personal history to talk about Japanese imperialism as a catalyst for migration to the US, and it focuses on comfort women, which were the sex slaves under Japanese imperialism, as a vessel for that. So it's a lot about women, states, powers, and familial sexual trauma. I was trying to answer questions while I was [working on MON]. This book is just poems that I wrote between 2020 and 2025. I have a lot of stuff there from grad school. I wasn't trying to write something around a project for the first time ever, and I definitely felt a little bit goosey with it. I wasn't sure where I was going. I was like, “is this ever gonna be anything?” But at some point, I compiled all the poems I had, and I thought of it as kind of a sequel to MON, because it focuses more on migration and the post-American dream. It's not about getting to the US, it's what happens when you've been here for a long time. And they fit together well enough. I added some poems in between, like the scenes, and I think that it pieced into something.
HS: I noticed that there is a throughline with the poetic constellations and the images that you call upon, such as the color yellow, which appears throughout the collection in various images. It adds spots of brightness amidst the sparse language and serious topics.
MK: Thank you, I appreciate it. That's the reason why I decided to start sending this out as a manuscript because when I was putting the poems together, I was like, “oh, there are these through lines.” Something that I developed when I was writing MON is the idea of collective memory. [There are memories we] feel like we remember, even if we weren't there. And something that I employ (and this happens with the photographs too, but we'll get into that later, I assume) is I try to reuse some images or words so that it can feel like a memory is at the tip of your tongue, like, did I read this, or am I remembering it? I want to put the reader into the space of remembering.
HS: Memory is a huge theme in this collection, and I love how you reuse certain words to reflect that theme. Since you're someone who thinks so deeply about memory, how do we bear the weight of that?
MK: It's because–I'm probably not allowed to say this anymore–I'm crazy. Like, I look out a window and am like wow that shadow is just like when I was 12. Memory is frustrating, but also, some of the themes that I'm dealing with are frustrating, such as labor or poverty. It’s about trying to have patience in the face of violence, especially as you realize why people act a certain way. I write because I am trying to get towards the feeling of something that I don't know how to articulate.
HS: Since this was written over the course of 5 years, how did you approach the complex topics that are present in your work, such as the pieces that explore certain family topics?
MK: I was just turning these ideas over in my head constantly and learning that this is something that I think about all the time. I think about it with people, I think about it with animals. The reason why I use animals and violences is…I don't know how to articulate it, but there's this sense of futility that I think about all the time. Like a bug is an easy one to do it with, or a mosquito. Mosquitoes come up a lot. The mosquito is trying to survive, so it's going to hurt you, and we're going to kill them because they're annoying, but also they were just doing what they needed to live, and I can live with a mosquito on my body, but I'm choosing not to. And no one's wrong in that, but it's all very, like, twisted and violent, and I find areas of ambiguity and overlapping truths to be really interesting, and that's why I turn it over in my poetry. I just did this over the course of many years with different subjects. I never went into a poem saying, I'm going to write about this thing. I would just be in a headspace about it.
HS: Also, something I love in this collection is how you handle the weightier topics while also making room for moments of humor and wryness. It’s very Mina.
MK: You’re probably picking up [on poems] that I wrote later in my career. I always deal with weighty topics, and the way I try to bring levity to that, so it's not just a huge bummer, is through sound quality and focusing on hyperspecificity [as a way to bring] more lightness into the work. In the beginning of writing this collection, I was writing a lot about childhood trauma. As I read through it, [I realized] I wanted to hear more of the speaker as an adult, so I'm excited to hear that there are points when the voice shifts, because I wanted it to be clear that [the speaker is moving through] a different time period. That’s where the moments of wryness come out.
HS: I've been thinking a lot about the role of beauty in writing. When we’re writing about various kinds of violence, should that be done in a beautiful way? I’d love to talk about your approach to craft.
MK: I think that there's definitely a point to be made [that] these things shouldn't be beautiful because they're not beautiful. From a moral and political standpoint, I agree with that, but from a creative output standpoint, it feels good to be creating something that is falling into place with the right sound quality. So I guess it's selfish, my search for beauty. But I also think that not from a sound quality standpoint, from an image standpoint (or maybe both, a combination of those), it's one thing to say that something awful is happening, or has happened, but it's another to get that emotion across, and it's hard to do that in a simple way. Using those tools of beauty can create a contrast or bring a humanness that makes things feel more real. I guess that's why art is powerful.
HS: So I want to talk about The Neighborhood Is Changing, which is a series of poems. The title is also a line within one of those poems. These poems are very sparse. They linger on small, mundane moments.
MK: The series started out as just two poems. I don't know how I decided that this should be a series. It's something that just happened, but the process of it was initially some erasure, and then an exercise of rewriting the same poem without looking at the poem and seeing what parts I found I wanted to expand on with each. And I got into more familial history with that, and that was an exciting direction for me to go in. The rest of the poems happened in really quick succession. I think it's a really good exercise. Everyone should try writing within the same limitations of a poem; same language, topic, and size. I also wanted to include a series that could act like an emotional anchor. I wanted this collection to be more like a photo album than random pieces.
HS: Why did you choose to use such spare language in this collection?
MK: I use sparse language, one, because I like it, and two, because initially I wanted to have poetry as something that a lot of people would be able to get into, specifically thinking about someone like my mother. I am much more fluent in English than she is. I shouldn't be writing something that's a wall for people. I know poetry is always going to be that way, to some extent, but I want it to be accessible. I don't want to alienate people that I want to read this work.
HS: Can you explain a little bit more about the photographs in the collection? Why did you want to include them in this project?
MK: I famously have not spoken to my dad in 12 years. These are photo albums that were at my dad's house. I expected not to ever see them again. But then, at some point, my brother rebuilt his relationship with my dad, and I received like 180 pictures of the family album. I had a pretty huge emotional reaction to that. I remember these moments, but now I'm seeing them again, except this time through a phone, and the quality is so bad. I was drawn towards how unclear these photos are, how messy and disoriented they are. And I wanted to disorient them further. I wanted to capture how memory over time causes confusion.
HS: I was thinking about my personal relationship to place as someone who has roots in Lebanon and also splitting time between Phoenix and Tulsa for different projects. I find that because of all this movement that I've been doing, place comes up a lot more in my work, in addition to thinking about other forms of movement such as migration. How does place come up in your work?
MK: Of course, place comes up because of migration because my mom left because she wanted to make more money; she had the whole American dream idea. I can't imagine (and this is something that I try to explore in my work) how it feels to leave a place for a better future, and then the place that you left is better off than where you are now. I think about this idea of trying to move towards something that doesn't exist. It’s as if you're in a pool, and you're moving really slowly. You're still in the pool. I feel like that sentiment comes up in the work, for sure. Yeah, that's just a sense of stagnation.
HS: Right? I think a lot of poets, myself included, kind of had to unlearn this urge to always reach toward hope in our work. But I think it's much more compelling to linger in those places of stagnation.
MK: I think that they're both compelling, but one of them is definitely more realistic and negative. I don't love sitting in that space because I also, on a personal level, I'm such a cheery girl. I'm very positive in my real life. All of my awful feelings of stagnation go into my work.
HS: Let’s talk about the last poem in the collection. Why did you decide to end the collection with “life as a pendulum”?
MK: That's the theme of things: you're trying your best, things can be pretty good, but nothing's changing. I don't know how to articulate this in any way other than poetry. There’s just this feeling (to steal one of my titles from one of the poems) of everything returning to itself. You're still in the same body doing the same things.
SPEED ROUND!
HS: Speed round! Favorite novel right now?
MK: All Fours by Miranda July
HS: Favorite film?
MK: Before Sunrise (1995)
HS: Favorite dish?
MK: Soup.
HS: Any soup in particular?
MK: Just soup.
HS: This brings us to the end.
MK: This is great. I'm scared of your mind.
HS: I'm scared of your mind. Thanks for chatting with me, Mina.
Hana Saad is a Lebanese-American writer based in Phoenix, AZ by way of Tulsa, OK. She is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. Her work is featured in Mizna and has been supported by the Arab American National Museum and Tin House. Connect with her on Instagram at @hanaxsaad or say hello at hana-saad.com .