Crab Orchard Poetry

"There is poetry here: our living language pulled into shape by hunger and intelligence."--Slate

"Tarfia Faizullah moves across landscapes and time to piece together a familial tragedy which presents the reader with a legacy of loss, violence, and pilgrimage."--American Literary Review

"Tarfia Faizullah's Seam shows us that history should admit the emotions that come with more personal memory and, more radically, that memory can include even that which did not happen to ourselves or to the ones we love. Poetry can best address the horrors of history--and of the present day--through such a gathering of the impersonal and intimate."--Poets' Quarterly

"Why call any of it back? Tarfia Faizullah asks in her gorgeous and powerful debut collection, Seam. The answer lies in the notion of legacy, our relationships to the troubled histories we inherit, how a landscape of the past can become a veined geography inside you, another body inside your own demanding reckoning, a just articulation. In poems made more harrowing for what's not said--the poet's elegant and wise restraint--we confront the past and its aftermath in the lives of women interrupted by violence and brutality and loss. Memory and the journey back are always fraught with difficulties. It wasn't enough light to see clearly by, she tells us, but I stillturned my face toward it. Faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision and Seam is a beautiful and necessary book."--Natasha Trethewey, United States Poet Laureate

"Seam reaffirms that imagination is the backbone of memory, the muscular fiber that enables us to re-grasp our humanity. Raised in West Texas, Faizullah examines the catastrophe that haunted her parents' life in America and in turn haunted her: the sisters, aunts, and grandmothers raped in Bangladesh in the 1971 liberation war. With patience and immaculate lyric precision, and with sublime attention to language and the courage to interrogate her privilege and curiosity, Faizullah twines a seam where the wounds are re-membered, fingers quivering, spooling, and unspooling what we know of healing. This is a powerful debut, a reminder that some things should perhaps never be forgiven, a poignant record set against forgetfulness."--Khaled Mattawa

"How thin the seam between this fierce book and all the poet's countrypeople who haven't lived to read it. Faizullah has made a courageous and shaming book. I hope this book will be translated everywhere."--Jean Valentine, author of Break the Glass

"This is a poetry of news--where brutality, desire, and beauty combine to form a rich testament of what poetry can do: to sing and disturb us awake, and leave us feeling more alive than ever before. Faizullah's debut collection of poems is simply a triumph--it's pure fire in your hands."--Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Lucky Fish