Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (Coffee House Press, 2019), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Osman’s first short film (co-directed), Sam Underground, profiled Sam Diaz, a teenage busker who would become the 2020 American Idol. She was the writer for Sun of the Soil, a short documentary on the complicated legacy of Malian emperor Mansa Musa. It was selected for inclusion in the Cannes International PanAfrican Film Festival and the New York African Film Festival. Osman’s directorial debut, The Ascendants, is streaming now. She lives in New York.
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Exiles of EdenFrom"Half-life"
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
Bray, flay, array.
They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying and just watch it.
You don’t even try to braid me together.
Exiles of Eden:Poems -
Exiles of EdenFrom"Refusing Eurydice"
We refuse death by spells.
We refuse death by attack.
We refuse death by falling,
and we refuse death in depressions.
We refuse the spirits that attempt oppression,
and we refuse the spirits that attempt possession.
We refuse humans who call themselves gods,
who try to graft hellfire onto our bodies,
and raise columns of fire in our yards.
We are looking for better myths.
Exiles of Eden:Poems -
Exiles of EdenFrom"NSFW"
I want us to get off before this screen sleeps.
I want to make a video
and play it on a loop,
let it ruin someone’s dinner.
I want to tell you
I had a nightmare about Oscar Grant’s murder
before it happened.
I want you to believe me
and turn me over and over.
Say: This hole? This one?
Cover them all.
Fill my mouth so I stop tasting blood.
The formatting of this excerpt differs from the
original poem.
Exiles of Eden:Poems
“Ladan Osman is one of the most alive minds in poetry today. Under her supreme gaze, the ordinary is allowed safe passage into strangeness and the surreal is domesticated without losing its innate chaos. Whether with the pen or with the lens, everything is lifted to a higher, fantastic dimension in the frame of Osman’s looking. Exiles of Eden scares me. It’s that good. I didn’t know you could do with language what Osman does, but thank the gods she did.” —Danez Smith, author of Don’t Call Us Dead
“A generous, rooted, and humbly adamant quest for agency.” —Publisher's Weekly [on Exiles of Eden]
“Ladan Osman is a poet of wonder and inquiry. Her wonder is muscular and thorough, and requires an inventory of the known, a charting of what is lost, and the incantation of desire . . . Here there is pain and music and thirst and the refusal to bend into a narrative these women have not shaped for themselves.” —Donika Kelly, author of Bestiary [on Exiles of Eden]
Selected Works
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Informed by world events as well as ancient myths, Ladan Osman’s dazzling and incisive poetry creates vibrant connections between generations of women, between the self and history, and between our bodies and the natural world. Some of her most fiercely imagined poems incorporate photographs, opening up a charged space between what is seen and what is heard. Marked by a capacious imagination and an emotionally resplendent sense of metaphor, her lines fray and pile up, pushing the vital, potent lyric further.