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Hard Damage
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.
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Hard Damage
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.
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.
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.
Table of Contents
Source Acknowledgments Reading Rilke in Berlin I. First Snow Asylum Dream with Horse Family Reunion Can You Describe Your Years in Prison? Azalea Azalea Funeral in Paris There Here How to Pronounce John Frusciante Correctly Blessed Are the Rich Ode to My Hair Unmotioning Smells Like Liberty What Your Life Was Like II. Mother of All Balms Nostalgia Is Not the Right Word Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin Vagabond Sisterhood At the Hospital, My Language I Wake Up Curled Up in a C. D. Wright Poem The Ownership of Naming Things Stone Self-Portrait as Wounded Doe of Artemis My Father Drives Me to Düsseldorf Airport Foreign Policies III. Rilke and I ich / I Lass / Let dir / You Alles / All Geschehn / Happen Schönheit / Beauty Und / And Schrecken / Terror IV. Covert United States Involvement in Regime Change, I Operation Cyclone I. Chaos II. Blue Bottle Fly Condition III. Hera IV. Ex Nihilo V. Hades VI. Dionysus VII. Ares VIII. Cyclopes IX. Cronus X. Catalogue of Grief XI. Interrogation Chamber Covert United States Involvement in Regime Change, II Operation Timber Sycamore V. The First Toast Nostos Fata Morgana, 1987 Meskonsing Your Whole Life Must Become a Sign and Witness to This Impulse Operation Cyclone, Years Later The Only Cab Service of Farmington, Maine Inventory of Lost Conditionals Acknowledgments Notes
