GATES

If you open Sahar Muradi’ s [ G A T E S ] and follow each line into the entryways and departures, passed “ convention centers and expos / and festivals that begin at sunset,” you will witness the poet’ s memories as tiny explosions of intimacies that devastate with their precision and candor. On images of Ferris wheels and “ prayer on the side of the road,” the poet “ kneels and spreads [her] picnic” of wonder. Sahar Muradi makes sense of the fragments of memory, the broken buildings of Kabul, Mazar, and Panjsher, the innocence of childhood punctured by journey, a father’ s illness, losing a language, and the politics of a war uninvited. Muradi beckons you, asks how you “ authored poorer nations with the hope of freeing / others. The architects of what’ s left.” Indeed the political act of poetry in this fierce collection is a pained beauty that does not look away as it rebuilds the human starting with the heart.— Rajiv Mohabir