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.
 

ISBN-13: 9781496215703

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Nebraska

Publication Date: 09-01-2019

Pages: 126

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

Series: Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

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 Show More