OCTOBERS traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.” Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language—as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of “home” and estranged from it, and, beyond it all and still, as a source of wild wonder.
Sahar Muradi
Sahar Muradi is author of the collection OCTOBERS (University of Pittsburgh Press), selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is author of the chapbook [... Read
moreSahar Muradi is author of the collection OCTOBERS (University of Pittsburgh Press), selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is author of the chapbook [ G A T E S ], the hybrid memoir Ask Hafiz (winner of the 2021 Patrons’ Prize for Emerging Artists from Thornwillow Press), and the chaplet A Garden Beyond My Hand. She is co-editor, with Seelai Karzai, of EMERGENC(Y): Writing Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War, An Anthology of Writing from Afghanistan and its Diaspora; and co-editor, with Zohra Saed, of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature. She is co-founder of the Afghan American Artists & Writers Association, directs the arts education programs at City Lore, and dearly believes in the bottom of the rice pot. Read
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