Hajar Hussaini
Hajar Hussaini is the author of Disbound: Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2022). Her translations from Persian include Death and His Brother: A Novel by Khosraw Mani (Syracuse University Press, 2027), which won a 2025 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and Wounded Vita Nuda: Poems by Maral Taheri (Deep Vellum, 2027), which won the 2025 Mo Habib Translation Prize. She was a 2025 MacDowell fellow. Hussaini also co-curates the Salon Salvage performance and reading series in Troy, NY. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is an assistant teaching professor of English at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, NY.
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Disbound
Notes from Kabul
on being fine when others aren’t;
notice graphic, how quotes
wax truth & assassinate
anecdotes
the surplus of survival
guilt covers pages & the data
at the price of two
boiled eggs
rectangular streets grind us
like watercolor powder
we wash blood off bags
& hats & the few
branches of tree
are in blaze yet we
still play stone scissor
paper
Disbound- Print Books
- University of Iowa Press
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Disbound
Sufis instead
do not speak
in fragments my drunken
lunatic let’s limp
patterns of assumptions
you’re not eating
just caffeine & cohol
my religion al-prohibits
asking for favor, gambling
on pounds you’ve been losing
my brahmin let’s become Sufis
instead, I’ll read you Persian poetry
in translation my soul is a print
where are you going? what language
are you speaking?
Disbound- Print Books
- University of Iowa Press
Hajar Hussaini’s work is a marvel of poetic architecture, one that propels readers to consider what war destroys and what remains. Her poems exemplify how mere fragments can contain the entirety of times, places, and people we thought lost. Defiant, they refuse to equate that loss with erasure. Hussaini assembles the shards of her home city of Kabul into a mosaic, honoring its history, culture, and future.