Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Hard Damage

Hard Damage

Aber, Aria

Paperback

Series: The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $17.95

ISBN10: 1496215702
ISBN13: 9781496215703
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: Sep 1 2019
Pages: 126
Weight: 0.43
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Hard Damage works to relentlessly interrogate the self and its shortcomings. In lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments, Aria Aber explores the historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations. Drawing on material dating back to the 1950s, she considers the consequences of these relations--in particular the funding of the Afghan mujahedeen, which led to the Taliban and modern-day Islamic terrorism--for her family and the world at large.

Invested in and suspicious of the pain of family and the shame of selfhood, the speakers of these richly evocative and musical poems mourn the magnitude of citizenship as a state of place and a state of mind. While Hard Damage is framed by free-verse poetry, the middle sections comprise a lyric essay in fragments and a long documentary poem. Aber explores Rilke in the original German, the urban melancholia of city life, inherited trauma, and displacement on both linguistic and environmental levels, while employing surrealist and eerily domestic imagery.

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