Congrats, dear Zohra, Purvi, and Tarfia!

“Kandahar,” by Zohra Saed, August 3

I have found myself taken by very short poems this year, and this is another tight lyric that packs it all in.

Kandahar –

............Was once a cube of sugar

Refusing to dissolve in the sea.

It became a city from sheer stubbornness.

“Loss is an art, traversing one world to the next,” by Purvi Shah, May 25

Questions of identity, cultural appropriation, beauty, and the body roil together in this gorgeous poem:

hundreds

of daughters walking towards a foreign

house, parents looking askance, blurred.

They say: absence is a color, the deep

brown of life which is always receding.

“Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh,” by Tarfia Faizullah, April 20

A model of a poem incorporating the words of another poet to great effect. Tarfia’s book, SEAM, recently won the Crab Orchard First Book Award. We await its 2014 appearance with anticipation!

I let in

the netherworld. Something

rose from underneath. I sit,

wait through my cousin's

sobs.