Tarfia Faizullah’s first book of poems, Seam, centers on the experiences of Bangladesh’s Birangona – the roughly 200,000 women who were raped and tortured during that country’s war of independence. Jonathan Farmer lauds the book:
The beauty of these poems does not redeem tragedy; at times, in fact, it seems to sully it. But that sullying—the humid tangle of lives, Faizullah’s own losses pressing in alongside the stories of the Birangona, her sexual desires flaring up back at her hotel room, her feelings of shame, her disquiet in the streets of Dhaka, the company of Western authors (Tomas Tranströmer, Paul Celan, Willa Cather) amid everyone else’s words—offers an unusually persuasive image of the ways old tragedies persist. They remain pressed in among the living and preserved by a hunger that is not always and not only for them, including a poet who might, in the midst of all these interviews, “reach for anyone // willing to wrap his good arm tight / around me for as long as the ribboned / darkness allows.” In a society still unable to make sense of the lives engendered by such an atrocity, that dark vitality seems to register more than purity ever could.
The Dish 