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.


Author: Aria Aber
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 09/01/2019
Series: Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Pages: 126
Weight: 0.43lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9781496215703


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/19/2019

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.