Machine generated contents note: The united nations of poetry rejects the full stop. Losing sight -- Inventory -- On our chest planes -- The property of being separate -- Phantasmagoria -- Tea house -- The photography of home -- Bombast: a Persian etymology -- Road trip -- Funeral -- Sufis instead -- On-site commands -- The field of death -- Incumbencies' dispatch -- Simple cafe -- Urban correspondents -- Telephone calls from PD #3 -- Inverse of most stories -- Madar jan -- Transhumance -- Provincial heartache -- Jocular geopolitics -- Self-checkout -- Chorus -- The blessed gambler -- The lane in an old email -- A diwan imprinted -- A distinctive duplication -- Peopleless -- Self-parody -- Meta-variable -- Stress & strain: a contrariety -- Common cause -- Blowback -- Precedes essence -- How everything should end -- The question -- Proctoring -- The quotidian -- The parenthetical is (internal) -- An agreement made -- The united nations of poetry rejects the full stop.
Summary:
Hajar Hussaini's poems in Disbound scrutinize the social, political, and historical traces inherited from one's language. The traces she finds--the flow of international commodities implied in a plosive consonant, an image of the world's nations convening to reject the full stop--retrieve a personal history between countries (Afghanistan and the United States) and languages (Persian and English) that has been constantly disrupted and distorted by war, governments, and media. Hussaini sees the subjectivity emerging out of these traces as mirroring the governments to whom she has been subject, blurring the line between her identity and her legal identification. The poems of Disbound seek beauty and understanding in sadness and confusion, and find the chance for love in displacement, even as the space for reconciliation in politics and thought seems to get narrower.
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