Hard Damage (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

Aber, Aria

ISBN 10: 1496215702 / ISBN 13: 9781496215703

Published by University of Nebraska Press, 2019

About this Item

pp. 126.

Seller Inventory # 26381584598

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Hard Damage (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496215702
• ISBN 13: 9781496215703
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.
 

About the Author

Aria Aber is a Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Narrative, and other publications.