Marie Scarles Reviews Aria Aber's Hard Damage

In her first collection of poetry, Hard Damage, Aria Aber "does not consent to the simple narrative or the soundbite," writes Scarles. "It reminds readers that every displaced person, whether refugee, immigrant, or the child of one, carries with them a parcel of stories, stories that are often suppressed and mutated by the dominant culture, or lost to reductive media coverage." More: 

Aber is the daughter of Afghan refugees; she was raised in Germany, and she studied in the United States. In Hard Damage, she illustrates the traumatic effects of displacement and highlights the reparative possibilities of cultivating love for one’s kin, as well as a wider community of living things: animals, plants, and the spirit included. Though trauma may strip life bare to what lies beneath the meaning-making systems of family, culture, language, religion, and nation, her book suggests that creative acts of community and generous works of art may help to hold a life in all its wholeness.

Hard Damage is divided into five sections: three sections of lyric poems frame the text, while the third and fourth sections comprise two longer meditations—a prose essay that explores Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous line—”Let everything happen to you: Beauty and Terror”—as well as a chapter of documentary poems that parse the events and precipitating factors of the American-led war in Afghanistan. The thrill of this book, for me, lies in its ethical reckoning; its poems enact what the epigraph from Rilke instructs, for the stakes are high: “Nearby is the country they call life.” The speaker in Hard Damage, it seems, is writing herself to life.

Read on at The Rumpus.