Registers of Illuminated Villages

"Tarfia Faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision." -Natasha TretheweySomebody is always singing. Songswere not allowed. Mother said,Dance and the bells will sing with you.I slithered. Glass beneath my feet. Ilocked the door. I did notdie. I shaved my head. Until the hornsI knew were there were visible.Until the doorknob went silent. -from "100 Bells"Registers of Illuminated Villages is Tarfia Faizullah's highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Faizullah's new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices-elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, "Register of Eliminated Villages," suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur'an in which the speaker's name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah is an essential new poet whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and-even in its unsparing brutality-full of love.