Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Raghead

Raghead

Hassan, Eman

Paperback

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1936970635
ISBN13: 9781936970636
Publisher: New Issues Poetry And Prose
Published: Oct 15 2019
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.40
Language: English
Deftly making use of historically specific events, Raghead examines the Gulf War, relaying untold narratives of occupation and warfare, as well as addressing the violence the war inflicted on the female body and on the land itself. In these poems, Eman Hassan explores the idea of trauma and memory through a maze of recollecting and forgetting, weighed against the importance of being in in the now.

Raghead examines what's at stake in a world that places greater value on capitalist machinations of war and oil production than on human life and the environment. With these poems, Hassan urges the reader to transcend the boundaries of identity and values, to reconcile the beautiful and ugly paradox of human existence, and to take a collective responsibility for the present. The work is both feminist and humanist: women are not painted as victims, even though some poems show how their bodies are controlled or abused. Rather, the poems seek to empower the feminine and explore how women can be complicit in power games.

Raghead often hits sublime high notes to offset some of the more tonally violent accounts. It offers a glimpse into Gulf-Arab culture that is oftentimes obscured, attempting to show an inherent violence and beauty that has marked the region. The poems are told from the vantage of being bicultural, exploring the inherent tension that comes from being simultaneously Kuwaiti and American, and musing on what it means to be both and yet neither in a journey towards self-emancipation. These lyrical witness poems are sometimes angry, oftentimes spiritual, in an attempt to rekindle a sense of interconnectedness between all people.

Also in

General Poetry

View All