Mothers Over Nangarhar

by Pamela Hart

Overview

Mothers Over Nangarhar is an unusual and powerful war narrative, focusing less on the front lines of combat and more on the home front, a perspective our American cultural canon has largely ignored after 222 years at war. In her stunning poetry debut, Pamela Hart concentrates on the fears and psychological battles suffered by parents, lovers, and friends during a soldier’s absence and return home, if indeed there’s a return. With honest grit and compassionate imagination, Hart describes her own experience having a son overseas, incorporating lyric meditations, photography, news articles, support group meetings, family interviews, oral histories, and classic literature to construct a documentary-style narrative very much situated in the now. Blending reality with absurdism and guided openly by a Calvino kind of logic, Hart reveals to us a crucial American point of view.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946448262
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	01/08/2019
Series:	Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry Series
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Pamela Hart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she teaches and manages an arts-in-education program called Thinking Through the Arts. She was awarded an NEA poetry fellowship in 2013. She recently received the Brian Turner Literary Arts prize for poetry. Her poems have been published in a variety of journals including the Southern Humanities Review, Bellevue Literary Review and Drunken Boat. Toadlily Press published her chapbook, The End of the Body. She is poetry editor and mentor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS Title Page War Partita 4 Cities & Signs & War 6 River of Painted Rocks 7 War Games 8 Flynn’s Pond 9 To the Person Who 10 At the Shooting Range 11 Women & War Sestina 12 The Cut 13 In the Red Cross Parking Lot 14 Sometimes We Talk About Nothing 15 The Shawl 16 The Matins Project 17 II Contour Drawing 19 Museum 20 Land Navigation 21 Birds Rising 22 How to Make a Diorama 23 The Women 24 Graces Watches the News 25 During War We Email Our Soldiers 26 In the Car 27 Globe Skimmer 28 Numerous Gray Areas 29 In Which I Talk to the Mother of Crazy Horse 30 Landay 31 Praise Song 32 Exhalation 33 III Field Notes from Home 35 Some Principles of Return 38 Kevlar Poem 39 Soldier Undated World War I 40 Rules of Engagement 41 The Map is not the Territory 42 The Ruby Ring 43 As Thetis 44 IV Looking at Monet’s Water Lilies 46 On the Orange Jumpsuit 47 CONTENTS Title Page War Stories 50 My Soldier 51 Night Vision 52 Over Nangarhar 53 Drone Song 54 Private Jonathon Lee Gifford’s Mother 55 Kevlar Poem II 56 Regarding the Improvised Explosive Device 57 Negative Capability 59 Birds Gather on Empty Ground 60 V Tea With the Vietcong Soldier’s Wife 62 Before After 63 Everything is Everywhere 64 Obon 65 Stray Dog Story 66 Not the Same 67 Memorial 68 M16/ M4 69 On the Soldier’s Birthday 70 Jalalabad 71 Transmigration 72

Editorial Reviews

01/21/2019

Rich with literary, political, and geographical references, Hart’s debut collection details the journey of a mother whose son is serving in Afghanistan. The five-part book weaves prose poems, a sestina, and a landay (a Pashtun folk form) alongside free verse. The speaker, who “read history/ to ward off unknowns,” remembers too that her “son’s first gun was a dinosaur.” In “Praise Song” she invokes Homer, but keeps the reader in the present: “I sing of your boots caked/ In clay rough with hours// of the IED you don’t step/ On and the dog who finds it.” The speaker visits a shooting range (“To know what you know I load/ seventeen hollow-point// bullets to nest/ in the chamber”) and reads Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Hart gives voice to Thetis (Achilles’ nymph mother), a detainee in Guantánamo, and a young girl who visits her former-soldier father in jail. Glenn Gould, Emily Dickinson, and Picasso appear alongside “Grace,” “Joanie,” and “Mary Jane,” women who are mothers or wives of soldiers. Hart’s drive to keep looking and listening while “the long war goes on” reads like a fundamental act of compassion. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Vulture , “4 Poetry Collections That Change the World”


The Millions , “Must-Read Poetry: January 2019”


Winner of the 2017 Kathryn A. Morton Prize


"Rich with literary, political, and geographical references, Hart’s debut collection details the journey of a mother whose son is serving in Afghanistan. . . . Hart’s drive to keep looking and listening while 'the long war goes on' reads like a fundamental act of compassion." —Publishers Weekly


"In her debut poetry collection, Hart brings a new, salient voice to our home front in times of war. . . . An artist by training, Hart creates word images that allow us to contemplate private and public pain. Certain lines stand out in these glowing poems: 'Like the Spartan women, we polish / our sons in the concrete firmament.' Or: 'My syntax breaks to lake ice / Who am I to translate the exodus of birds.' . . . [F]inely crafted poems."

— Booklist


“This honest and compassionate debut from the mother of a soldier adopts a rarely seen focus in the annals of wartime literature, turning attention toward the home front rather than the combat front.”

— Publishers Weekly


"Hart is also publishing a book of poems, Mothers over Nangarhar, inspired by her work."

—O, The Oprah Magazine


"Though the canon abounds with war poets — Homer, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Walt Whitman — fewer describe the complexities of the home front. Pamela Hart works to correct this by telling the stories, including her own, of the parents, spouses, and children of those who serve. 'This isn’t a story of war,' she writes. 'This is the mother on the idea of a son at war.'"

—Jonathan Russell Clark, Vulture , "New Year, New Verse: 4 Poetry Collections That Change the World"


"Hart captures the paradox of a service member’s family: Hope keeps them alive, but hope is exhausting. Hart’s book ponders the mixture of pride and love for a son, fear for his safety, anxiety and guilt over violence. 'He was small and almost perfect at birth,' she writes. 'Did I raise him up to be a warrior.' There is no question mark here because, Hart knows, there is no answer."

—Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions , "Must-Read Poetry: January 2019"


"[W]hat was once only imagined is subsequently brought to devastating life. . . . [Mothers Over Nangarhar] is an homage to military families, for whom the Long War has ceased to end, despite being far removed from most Americans’ daily consciousness."

—Laura Kasinof, Poetry Foundation


"Reading this extraordinary book gives you a vision of the home front view of war. It is loved and highly recommended."

—Amir Shefayee, Medium


"Though language cannot encompass the enormity of war’s influence, it can still bring us as close as possible to expressing the inexpressible. This Hart does masterfully through an array of voices, all of whom echo and reecho what it means to survive and communicate war."

—Lindsey Weishar, Ploughshare


"Not in a long time have I read poems about soldiers that so powerfully combine the beauty of language with the melancholy of war, a testimony to the truth that wars live on death and the burden falls on those who bore and loved a soldier and will never escape the grief of loss." —Bill Moyers


“… Mothers Over Nangarhar moves through its mazy, crazed world of intimate and global conflict, exterior and interior pain, searching and assured. It is a beautiful, strong, and vulnerable work for our beautiful, strong, and increasingly vulnerable world.” —Rowan Ricardo Phillips, June 2017

" Mothers Over Nangarhar is like no book of poetry I’ve read. It tells of the mothers whose 'beautiful and dangerous' children and partners fight our world’s wars. Their emotions are difficult to imagine, but we don’t need to imagine them, since these poems deliver them with lyric precision directly to our hearts. The stories the book includes are both eternal ('the long war goes on') and heartbreakingly particular ('There was the time I told your cradle I was done / Locked you in the van then shopped at Walgreens'), and Pamela Hart is a storyteller aware of all of a story’s implications: 'Can he kill is a story. Will the mother blame herself could be another.' Mothers Over Nangarhar is a document, a warning, a lament—beautiful and dangerous."
—Kathleen Ossip

From the Publisher