"I Am a Rohingya implores the world to listen to the spirit of a people who have experienced, and continue to experience, some of the worst human rights abuses, but who, even under extreme duress and the constant reality of violence from the Myanmar state, know the spirit and intactness of their voice, their right to be a people and to live in the land that is their home. The suppression of the Rohingya by the machinery of British colonialism, then the military dictatorship, and the failure of post-dictatorship government to arrest the attack on the Rohingya and what is essentially an apartheid condition, have brought the people to speak out of their refugee camps along the border with Bangladesh, to find hope in language and the aurality of their language, to see their poetry on the page, and to make poetry do the work it needs to do so that outsiders can hear, can understand."
—John Kinsella (from the preface to the anthology)

"The Rohingya poets gathered here for the first time in English hold a mirror to the light for the rest of humanity, flashing their poems of misery and warning from the genocidal zone and refugee camp of Cox's Bazaar. Their songs are more accurate than news reports for word of the plight of the most oppressed. These are poems that begin with the fragrance on the bird's handkerchief and end by walking among the mass graves. They write from a dire present to a possible future, wondering in their peril if the world outside was too quiet to hear them. Let the world not be quiet, let the world listen to these poems."
—Carolyn Forché