Gates - Paperback

by Sahar Muradi (Author)

If you open Sahar Muradi's [ G A T E S ] and follow each line into the entryways and departures, passed " convention centers and expos / and festivals that begin at sunset," you will witness the poet's memories as tiny explosions of intimacies that devastate with their precision and candor. On images of Ferris wheels and " prayer on the side of the road," the poet " kneels and spreads [her] picnic" of wonder. Sahar Muradi makes sense of the fragments of memory, the broken buildings of Kabul, Mazar, and Panjsher, the innocence of childhood punctured by journey, a father's illness, losing a language, and the politics of a war uninvited. Muradi beckons you, asks how you " authored poorer nations with the hope of freeing / others. The architects of what's left." Indeed the political act of poetry in this fierce collection is a pained beauty that does not look away as it rebuilds the human starting with the heart. -- Rajiv Mohabir

Author Biography

Sahar Muradi is author of the collection OCTOBERS, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the chapbook [ G A T E S ], the hybrid memoir Ask Hafiz, and the chaplet A Garden Beyond My Hand. She is also co-editor, with Seelai Karzai, of EMERGENC(Y): Writing Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War, An Anthology of Writing from Afghanistan and its Diaspora. Sahar is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award in Poetry, a Stacy Doris Memorial Poetry Award, and twice recipient of the Himan Brown Poetry Award. Her writing has been supported by the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Bethany Arts Community, Blue Mountain Center, Kundiman, and WOC Writers. 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. saharmuradi.com