Registers of Illuminated Villages Poems [Paperback]

Tarfia Faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision. Natasha Trethewey

Somebody is always singing. Songs
were not allowed. Mother said,
Dance and the bells will sing with you.
I slithered. Glass beneath my feet. I
locked the door. I did not
die. I shaved my head. Until the horns
I knew were there were visible.
Until the doorknob went silent.

from 100 Bells

Registers of Illuminated Villagesis Tarfia Faizullahs highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut,Seam. Faizullahs new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voiceselegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, Register of Eliminated Villages, suggests illuminated texts, one a Quran in which the speakers name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah is an essential new poet whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, andeven in its unsparing brutalityfull of love.

These poems open slowly, elegantly, cradling anger, compassion, and fear.NPR.org

In her fiercely original second collection, Tarfia Faizullah traverses the globenorthern Iraq; Flint, Mich.; West Texas; Bangladeshand employs a range of formal experiments to illuminate acts of resistance in the face of injustice and violence.Star Tribune(Minneapolis)

Faizullah is an essential poet for our times.The Rumpus

Faizullahs entire collectionpowerful, wide-rangingis l±