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Hard DamageFrom"Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin"
To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing for before? I have a faint depression
polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music
in everything if you tune into it
devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum,
the German word for dream.
Hard Damage: -
Hard DamageFrom"Family Reunion"
Later, while our mothers
snore on the living room floor,
we gumshoe past jayenamaz,
pack our lives like limp geese
by the neck and let them dangle
from the window to avoid
looking at the faces
we’re about to lose. Family, to me,
is only the sweat of female secrecy:
Negoor’s body hair sings
to mine as she passes me
the joint, cheeks wistful
with the heaven of Aghan
blow.
Hard Damage: -
Hard DamageFrom"Afghan Funeral in Paris"
The aunts here clink Malbec glasses
and parade their grief with musky,
expensive scents that whisper
in elevators and hallways.
Each natural passing articulates
the unnatural: every aunt has a son
who fell, or a daughter who hid in rubble
for two years, until that knock of officers
holding a bin bag filled with a dress
and bones. But what do I know?
Hard Damage:
“Aber is not afraid of erudition or the hard labor of crafting poems that peel open in layers; at times, reading her work reminded me of poets who have worked across similarly broad linguistic topographies: Carolyn Forché, Frank Bidart, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and others. But Aber’s work here is hardly derivative of those masters. She is her own poet, her own voice, and her debut is my favorite volume of poetry this year.” —Christian Kiefer, Paris Review [on Hard Damage]
“With disarming ease, Aria Aber’s Hard Damage leaps from the personal to the political, from song to theory, from Rilke to ‘Afghan blow,’ from a German childhood back to an earlier Afghani family history, ending up in a richly vexed American life. These juxtapositions are electrifying, eloquent . . . ‘What is it that we owe to each other?’ Aber asks, calling us into ‘history’s collateral light.’” —Catherine Barnett, author of Human Hours
"Aria Aber’s stunning debut is both deeply personal and deeply historical. Examining the effects of western colonialism on Afghanistan and the consequences of decisions dating back to the 1950s, Hard Damage questions and mourns the idea of citizenship. This collection focuses on stories of displacement, which Aber accomplishes by breaking boundaries, breaking forms, and even breaking language." —Anthony Frame, Chicago Review of Books
Aria Aber breaks words and grammar open like atoms, letting the energy pour out. Her poems evoke worlds lost and found with glowing intensity, and this first collection is a riotous meeting place where Rilke, pedicures, lamb kebabs, Proust, and the goddess Artemis cross paths. She explores the contradictions of identity with tender appreciation, resisting easy truths. Working with mythologies and insects, grime and beauty, repetition and investigation, her multiple languages braid and teach each other what words can mean. There are lines of such staggering beauty that they catch in the throat.