Registers of Illuminated Villages
Poems
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ISBN10: 1555978002
ISBN13: 9781555978006
Paperback
96 Pages
$16.00
CA$21.00
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 Villages is Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices—elegies, 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 Qur’an in which the speaker’s 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, and—even in its unsparing brutality—full of love.
Reviews
Praise for Registers of Illuminated Villages
“In her fiercely original second collection, Tarfia Faizullah traverses the globe—northern Iraq; Flint, Mich.; West Texas; Bangladesh—and employs a range of formal experiments to illuminate acts of resistance in the face of injustice and violence.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“Identity is never simple, and Faizullah’s central speaker allows us to witness an intimate portrait of a young woman straddling two very different cultures.”—World Literature Today
“Reading Faizullah, one might allude to Adrienne Rich’s poetry and her vision of confronting reality in fresh language. The poet neatly allows the surfaces of things, through attentive description, to reveal their tumultuous depth . . . [Faizullah’s] interest in modern history gives the poems a force that goes beyond the issues at hand to a more universal spectrum.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“A mesmerizing inventory . . . Mingling cemeteries and spelling bees, fables and reality, religious faith and remarkable irreverence, these commanding, radiant, image-rich poems time and again spin ‘the dark into song’—and it’s electrifying.”—Booklist