Hijra (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

Perhaps, like me, you've been numbed by the daily footage of civilians surviving the catastrophes in the Middle East. Perhaps the decades of media coverage has ravaged your compassion. If so, the peculiar beauty of these poems, each spoken by a woman under siege, will restore you. I've never thought of poetry as being important in quite this way. I read this collection with gratitude. And, amazingly, like the poems in Alyan's earlier collections, these are also quick, always surprising, always painful or poignant and yet weirdly delightful. Each is a potent compound of sensuality, madness, tenderness, and flashes of some new version of wit. Hijra accomplishes all this while rendering war horrors in mosaics seen up close. Depictions of starvation, for example, are made of fragments of intimate, delicate and luminous flashes of beauty. When you finish reading a poem and step back from the mosaic, the close-up becomes astonishingly and unforgettably real. You will remember these women--many un-housed--women with their lovers or husbands, their sisters and old mothers; sexy women foraging in the rubble for their necklaces or silver spoons, for flowers and bird carcasses for their surviving child's dinner. And you will remember the wealthy girls at a party--perhaps in Beirut--"listening" to a man bleed in the street below the balcony, then smelling the stink of snapped electrical wires, and swilling arak. So Hijra brings the endless headlines of devastation right into your lap. If have been numbed, you will welcome it as a gift.

This is the poet to watch out for. Her lyric visions compare to no one. Favorite book of poetry this year.

What a wonderful collection of poems. I really enjoyed reading this book and recommend it highly. They are touching poetic stories from the heart. I look forward to the next work from this poet. Cheers!