ISBN: 9781914221125
Paperback: 92 pages
Publisher: Hajar Press, 2022
Language: English
Objects from April and May is a rumination on the sanctity and significance of cherished possessions. Informed by the loss of precious gold in an armed robbery, these poems trace each taken item across years and borders, from a supermarket in Brooklyn to a checkpoint in Occupied Palestine to an American compound in Iraq. Yet they return, irrevocably, to a violent interaction on a quiet street in Oakland, California, gathering its shattered fragments.
Formally inventive and politically astute, Zena Agha’s poems bristle with a controlled melancholy. As she unspools one traumatic encounter and its reverberations, she shows how much material loss can teach us about love, attachment and sorrow.
Finalist for the Alice James Book Award 2020, the Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize 2020 & the Philip Levine Poetry Prize 2020.
Zena Agha is a Palestinian-Iraqi writer and poet from London. She has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her writing has been featured by The Margins, The New York Times and NPR. Objects from April and May is her first book.
