Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems

“Tarfia Faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision.” –Natasha Trethewey

Somebody is always singing. Songs
were not allowed. Mother said,
Dance and the bells will sing with you.
I slithered. Glass beneath my feet. I
locked the door. I did not
die. I shaved my head. Until the horns
I knew were there were visible.
Until the doorknob went silent.

–from “100 Bells”

Registers of Illuminated Villages is Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices–elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages,” suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah is an essential new poet whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and–even in its unsparing brutality–full of love.

Author: Tarfia Faizullah
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 03/06/2018
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.4lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.40w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781555978006
Language: English