Mothers Over Nangarhar
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Mothers Over Nangarhar is an unusual and powerful war narrative, focusing less on the front lines of combat and more on the home front, a perspective our American cultural canon has largely ignored after 222 years at war. In her stunning poetry debut, Pamela Hart concentrates on the fears and psychological battles suffered by parents, lovers, and friends during a soldier’s absence and return home, if indeed there’s a return. With honest grit and compassionate imagination, Hart describes her own experience having a son overseas, incorporating lyric meditations, photography, news articles, support group meetings, family interviews, oral histories, and classic literature to construct a documentary-style narrative very much situated in the now. Blending reality with absurdism and guided openly by a Calvino kind of logic, Hart reveals to us a crucial American point of view.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rich with literary, political, and geographical references, Hart's debut collection details the journey of a mother whose son is serving in Afghanistan. The five-part book weaves prose poems, a sestina, and a landay (a Pashtun folk form) alongside free verse. The speaker, who "read history/ to ward off unknowns," remembers too that her "son's first gun was a dinosaur." In "Praise Song" she invokes Homer, but keeps the reader in the present: "I sing of your boots caked/ In clay rough with hours// of the IED you don't step/ On and the dog who finds it." The speaker visits a shooting range ("To know what you know I load/ seventeen hollow-point// bullets to nest/ in the chamber") and reads Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Hart gives voice to Thetis (Achilles' nymph mother), a detainee in Guant namo, and a young girl who visits her former-soldier father in jail. Glenn Gould, Emily Dickinson, and Picasso appear alongside "Grace," "Joanie," and "Mary Jane," women who are mothers or wives of soldiers. Hart's drive to keep looking and listening while "the long war goes on" reads like a fundamental act of compassion.
