 | |
| Author | Aria Aber |
|---|---|
| Publisher | University of Nebraska Press |
Publication date | September 1, 2019 |
| Pages | 126 |
| Awards | Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry Whiting Award |
| ISBN | 978-1496215703 |
| Followed by | Good Girl |
Hard Damage is a 2019 debut poetry collection by Aria Aber. It was published by University of Nebraska Press after winning the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry in 2018. [1] In 2020, Aber received a Whiting Award for the book. [2]
Aber grew up as the daughter of Afghan refugees who resettled in Germany. She later moved to the United States and studied poetry at New York University's MFA program. Written partly during Aber's studies in New York City, the book's poems contend with, among other things, historical events in Afghanistan such as the Soviet–Afghan War and the funding of the Afghan mujahideen. [3]
Some of the poems make reference to Rainer Maria Rilke, such as "Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin". In interviews, Aber cited Rilke as an enormous influence on her as a poet and person. In Atticus Review, she stated: "Rilke had a great appreciation for the world of childhood, and the older I get, the more I understand the tremendous sanctitude of that. Childhood is a time of art, of pure poetry, of connection to the divine ... So, I think I am speaking through Rilke and of Rilke all the time because there is this urge to reach toward the divine, the purity of the soul, even in times of war." [4]
Publishers Weekly said that "Though not every poem here may achieve its ambition, the book engages with important geopolitical events." [5]
Critics appreciated Aber's approach to the difficult subject matter of modern war. The Rumpus said that the book "reminds readers that every displaced person, whether refugee, immigrant, or the child of one, carries with them a parcel of stories, stories that are often suppressed and mutated by the dominant culture, or lost to reductive media coverage." [6] Similarly, The Los Angeles Review of Books stated that "If documentary witness shows us what is, Aber’s is a lyric witness—summoning the conditional and counterfactual as constitutive components of the present." [7] The Kenyon Review found that "A sharp morality directs this collection, demonstrating the speaker’s power in her ability to understand and relay the complexity of her position in global conflicts." [8] The Bind stated that "The poems range impressively from zoomed out catalogues of US military interventions to focused considerations of how the political impacts family and the displaced self." [9] The Cleveland Review of Books analyzed Aber's relationships to Afghan history and Rainer Maria Rilke, juxtaposing the book with Solmaz Sharif's poetry. [10]
Critics also felt that the book's approaches to love, family, and identity were poignant. The Manchester Review stated that the book "charts immigrant experience in a way which is highly imaginative but also sustained and controlled." [11] The Atticus Review observed Aber's "deep love" for "her mother, family, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke ... and the many people of Afghanistan—those who brave the war and those who are in exile, their compass pointed toward home." [4]
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist. Acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language. His work is viewed by critics and scholars as possessing undertones of mysticism, exploring themes of subjective experience and disbelief. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence.
Randall Jarrelljə-REL was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
Galway Mills Kinnell was an American poet. His dark poetry emphasized scenes and experiences in threatening, ego-less natural environments. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1982 collection, Selected Poems and split the National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright. From 1989 to 1993, he was poet laureate for the state of Vermont.
Stephen Mitchell is a poet, translator, scholar, and anthologist. He is best known for his translations and adaptions of works including the Tao Te Ching, the Epic of Gilgamesh, works of Rainer Maria Rilke, and Christian texts.
The Duino Elegies are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He was then "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", and began the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea. The poems were dedicated to the Princess upon their publication in 1923. During this ten-year period, the elegies languished incomplete for long stretches of time as Rilke had frequent bouts with severe depression—some of which were related to the events of World War I and being conscripted into military service. Aside from brief periods of writing in 1913 and 1915, he did not return to the work until a few years after the war ended. With a sudden, renewed burst of frantic writing which he described as a "boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit"—he completed the collection in February 1922 while staying at Château de Muzot in Veyras, Switzerland. After their publication in 1923, the Duino Elegies were soon recognized as his most important work.
Kevin D. Prufer is an American poet, novelist, academic, editor, and essayist. He is Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.
Raziq Faani was a renowned Afghan poet and novelist from the city Kabul. He published more than ten volumes of poetry and novels in Persian.
Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi-American poet based in the United States.
Kundiman is a nonprofit organization dedicated to writers and readers of Asian American literature. Among its services are readings, workshops, mentorship programs, writing intensives, as well as a poetry prize and an annual writing retreat, the Kundiman Retreat.
Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor.
Dan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country's most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College.
Jericho Brown is an American poet and writer. Born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, Brown has worked as an educator at institutions such as the University of Houston, the University of San Diego, and Emory University. His poems have been published in The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, Oxford American, and The New Yorker, among others. He released his first book of prose and poetry, Please, in 2008. His second book, The New Testament, was released in 2014. His 2019 collection of poems, The Tradition, garnered widespread critical acclaim.
Solmaz Sharif is an Iranian-American poet. Her debut poetry collection, Look, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at UC Berkeley.
Diane Seuss is an American poet and educator. Her book frank: sonnets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022.
Matthew Minicucci is an American writer and poet. His first full-length collection, Translation, won the 2015 Wick Poetry Prize. His second collection, Small Gods, was published in 2017 and won the 2019 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award in Poetry. Having received numerous fellowships and residencies, including with the National Park Service, the C. Hamilton Bailey Oregon Literary Fellowship, the Stanley P. Young Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the James Merrill House, Minicucci was named the 2019 Dartmouth College Poet-in-Residence at the Frost Place.
Aria Aber is an American poet and writer based in Los Angeles, California.
Anaïs Duplan is a queer and trans Haitian writer now based in the U.S., with three book publications from Action Books, Black Ocean Press, and Brooklyn Arts Press, along with a chapbook from Monster House Press. His work has been honored by a Whiting Award and a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International. He is a Professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, of which he is also an alum.
Customs is a poetry collection by Solmaz Sharif published in 2022.
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Oculus is a 2019 poetry collection by Sally Wen Mao, published by Graywolf Press. Mao's second poetry collection, it was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry.