Deschutes Public Library

Hard damage, Aria Aber

eng

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

no index present

poetry

Hard damage

1089965823

Aria Aber

Prairie Schooner book prize in poetry

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 relationsђ́ؤin particular the funding of the Afghan mujahedeen, which led to the Taliban and modern-day Islamic terrorismђ́ؤfor 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

adult