Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets [Paperback]

Five female Afghan poets wield language to combat the loneliness, absurdity, and claustrophobia of life in a war-torn country and its diaspora.There are “hypnotic, long beards” tangled with mass extinctions; hateful men burning grapevines; black blindfolds; jinn in chadors; and condoms advertised every eight minutes on TV. Interspersing these are tender moments: one poet describes brushing her daughter’s hair, while another imagines a tree growing at the center of a room, undisturbed by the bombs outside. In the wake of the Taliban’s escalating war on Afghan women’s rights, Hair on Fire is a blazing tribute to a group of exceptional poetesses and a reminder of what we lose when voices are silenced.US

“So much burns beautifully, powerfully, urgently in this book: poems of loss and grief, yes, but also of sarcasm and cybersex, of quiet and contradiction, of sunflowers and saliva…”—Sahar Muradi, author ofOCTOBERS

“The astute and assured poems populating Hair on Fire are exemplary of women’s capacity to excavate hope by wielding the future conditional. Writing in and from different domestic conditions and exilic modes, these five Afghan poets and their translators examine and question the very task of poetry: to reanimate language against imperial projects of effacement. Crystalline and clarifying,Hair on Fire is a feat of futurity:They will grow green, one day, / all these dreams / that we have buried in the breast of the earth.—Sarah Ghazal Ali, author ofTheophanies

Praise for the Calico Series

"Strange in evocative and enticingly varied ways, these previously untranslated treasures are each a littlӸ