Cover art: Detail from Saadia Batool’s A Thread to Map a Route, 2022. Mixed media on canvas, 11 × 16
OCTOBERS ARRIVES 10.10.23
“OCTOBERS is a richly gripping poem-journey through lives and languages, migrations/transitions, with profound openness to curious complexity. Sahar Muradi, born in Afghanistan, resident of New York City, employs subtly understated images, reeling us into woven mysteries of time and story. It’s as if Muradi is speaking up from a difficult, often silent space for those who are forced to flee, recalibrate, make new homes, somewhere, anywhere, right here: ‘this one morning with its distinct wink’—brilliant. I feel I have never read anything quite like this voice before—it’s rare and so important.”
- Naomi Shihab Nye, Donald Hall Prize judge and author of Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems
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OCTOBERS traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that staggering month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.” Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language—as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of “home” and estranged from it, and, beyond it all and still, as a source of wild wonder.
IMPORTANT: Alas, printing errors happen. Please refer to this corrected and updated Notes page, which provides important context for the poems. This version also provides more historical context than what appears in the book, which may be particularly useful to educators.
WHAT THEY SAY
Charged with bracingly original sight and sensibility, OCTOBERS is a book that ruptures experiences of exile, ravages of empire, lavish griefs, and unspeakable bindings to reveal in them astonishing new musics. Muradi’s approach is radially expansive—this is a collection woven out of thick strands of complex feeling and thought, geographic and psychic mappings, rhythmic vitality and kinetic structure. Not hyperbole: each line on every page is coiled, indelible in its impression. How long have I awaited this book? Muradi’s poems are those I feel protective over, so deeply do they shake and remake me. Hers is a voice you follow to its interminable reaches.
-Jenny Xie, author of Eye Level and The Rupture Tense
With profound tenderness, Sahar Muradi’s OCTOBERS announces the arrival of a wonderful new poet. She undoes language, weaves it anew: through ellipses, through snippets of Dari and Arabic, all the while singing of ‘white phosphorus over raqqa,’ of the orange wings of monarch butterflies, and the orange uniforms of Guantánamo. The fierce intelligence of her poems insists on the power of language to bring close again, or at least retrace, what is lost. This is a voice I have been waiting for.
-Aria Aber, author of Hard Damage
OCTOBERS inhabits a deeply intimate space between countries seeking wholeness in belonging. There is belief here: belief in father, belief in God, belief in the wilderness of motherland, and belief in home. The experiments in dialogue, in artistic form, poem as visual paintings, and the visceral momentum of the zuihitsu create a vocabulary of resistance and praise. There is complexity to the texture of the movement of bodies and its connection to self and the bonds that anchor it.
-Tina Chang, author of Hybrida
I’m in awe of this book. And proud. Sharp, keen, elegant, muscular: OCTOBERS engages both the glories and madness of humanity with refined, rigorous, unapologetic wonder. Exile, homeland, occupation, war—which is to say: love—and time. In this resplendent debut, we are witnessing the arrival of a formidable new talent. These poems contain words ‘whose feet never touch the ground.’ Muradi yields meticulous prowess—fired and bolting hard—right from the gate.
-Robin Coste Lewis, author of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness and Voyage of the Sable Venus