Aria Aber

In lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments, Hard Damage charts the intergenerational damage caused by war, environmental loss, and the collective grief of exile.

Hard Damage

aber is a poet who reveres & defends language—this collection's attention to translation (& what gets lost in it; translation through exile, through immigration, through generation) & its corollary attention to sound & music is razor-sharp. aber is a master technician, the poems in this collection are at once imaginative & compressed, sprawling & structured; a function of how deliberate she is with form & syntax, and just emotional compression & remarkable control of image. reading this after her novel, i thought through this entire collection that all of us have maybe three questions that we spend all our lives thinking & writing about & trying to answer, it turns out there just isn't anything else

Hard Damage

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