“ Why call any of it back? Tarfia Faizullah asks in her gorgeous and powerful debut collection, Seam. Poetry can best address the horrors of history-and of the present day-through such a gathering of the impersonal and intimate."- Poets' Quarterly "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. "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 "There is poetry here: our living language pulled into shape by hunger and intelligence."- Slate Winner, Drake University Emerging Writers Award, 2015 Authors/Editors Winner, Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, 2015 Winner, Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, 2014 Fierce yet loving, devastating and magical at once, Seam is a testament to the lingering potency of memory and the bravery of a nation’s victims.
Moving from West Texas to Dubai, from Virginia to remote villages in Bangladesh and back again, the narrator calls on the legacies of Willa Cather, César Vallejo, Tomas Tranströmer, and Paul Celan to give voice to the voiceless.
As we read, we discover the profound yet fragile seam that unites the fields, rivers, and prisons of the 1971 war with the poet’s modern-day hotel, or the tragic death of a loved one with the holocaust of a nation. Throughout the volume, the narrator endeavors to bridge generational and cultural gaps even as the victims recount the horror of grief and personal loss. As the child of Bangladeshi immigrants, the poet in turn explores her own losses, as well as the complexities of bearing witness to the atrocities these war heroines endured. The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War.
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