If you open Sahar Muradi's [ G A T E S ] and follow each line into the entryways and departures, passed " convention centers and expos / and festivals that begin at sunset," you will witness the poet's memories as tiny explosions of intimacies that devastate with their precision and candor. On images of Ferris wheels and " prayer on the side of the road," the poet " kneels and spreads [her] picnic" of wonder. Sahar Muradi makes sense of the fragments of memory, the broken buildings of Kabul, Mazar, and Panjsher, the innocence of childhood punctured by journey, a father's illness, losing a language, and the politics of a war uninvited. Muradi beckons you, asks how you " authored poorer nations with the hope of freeing / others. The architects of what's left." Indeed the political act of poetry in this fierce collection is a pained beauty that does not look away as it rebuilds the human starting with the heart. -- Rajiv Mohabir

Author: Sahar Muradi
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Published: 10/01/2017
Pages: 40
Weight: 0.1lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.30w x 0.20d
ISBN: 9781625579843

About the Author
Muradi, Sahar: - Sahar Muradi is a writer, performer, and educator born in Afghanistan and raised in the US / is co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature / is co-founder of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association / has published most recently in Bone Bouquet, and Dusie / is a recipient of the 2016 Stacy Doris Memorial Poetry Award, a Kundiman Poetry Fellowship, and an AAWW Open City Fellowship / directs the poetry programs at City Lore / and believes in the bottom of the rice pot.