What do you think?
Rate this book
The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Osman’s speakers, who are almost always women, assert and reassert in an attempt to establish authority, often through persistent questioning. Specters of race, displacement, and colonialism are often present in her work, providing momentum for speakers to reach beyond their primary, apparent dimensions and better communicate. The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.
108 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2015
15 people are currently reading
304 people want to read
About the author
Ladan Osman
8 books35 followersLadan Osman (Somali: Laadan Cismaan, Arabic: لادان عثمان) is a Somali-American poet and teacher. She was born in Mogadishu. Her poetry is centered on her Somali and Muslim heritage, and has been published in a number of prominent literary magazines. In 2014, she was awarded the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for her collection The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony.
Osman earned a BA from Otterbein University. She subsequently studied at the University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers, where she earned an MFA. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Union League Civic & Arts Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, and Michener Center for Writers.
Osman lives in Chicago.
Osman earned a BA from Otterbein University. She subsequently studied at the University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers, where she earned an MFA. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Union League Civic & Arts Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, and Michener Center for Writers.
Osman lives in Chicago.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 13, 2016
I am saying that I have finished reading this rich collection of poems only because I read from the first page to the last but I am still reading it. I continue to ponder its mysteries, and massage favorite lines, passages and startling perspectives. Maybe with some more readings I will write more fully about the impression Ladan Osman's fine, fine, finely-crafted poems are making on me. I mean this is a process happening in my heart and mind right now in the present.
I will copy out one of her poems for you to read, now.
Trouble
I have a chill on my womb.
I have a child in my wound.
Everything is massed up. The sea doesn’t blow.
The wind rivers the sea in the wrong direction.
How will I get along with this man wolfing me?
How will I get alone? He herd me.
It never bordered me before,
what I got as a regard.
We used the hardest language.
We cast threats. We’ll born in hell.
Some of us fall by the waistside
and some of us sore to the stars.
***
read more about New Generation African Poets at http://folkloreandliteracy.com/2015/0...
cheers!
I will copy out one of her poems for you to read, now.
Trouble
I have a chill on my womb.
I have a child in my wound.
Everything is massed up. The sea doesn’t blow.
The wind rivers the sea in the wrong direction.
How will I get along with this man wolfing me?
How will I get alone? He herd me.
It never bordered me before,
what I got as a regard.
We used the hardest language.
We cast threats. We’ll born in hell.
Some of us fall by the waistside
and some of us sore to the stars.
***
read more about New Generation African Poets at http://folkloreandliteracy.com/2015/0...
cheers!
April 22, 2015
What a gift Ladan Osman has given us with her debut collection The Kitchen Dweller’s Testimony. Ladan is both of and above this earth: her poems float above us as they make observations about the situations and life she lays out, as well as deal with the very tangible reality of living on this earth as a woman of color and immigrant. Her work is inquisitive, gently exploring the world around her. Her language is also full of play, teasing, joyful, blending both the divine and the secular.
This is a wonderful read, one that I would encourage all readers to explore.
This is a wonderful read, one that I would encourage all readers to explore.
Read
April 4, 2015My review for the Chicago Tribune:
In his tongue-in-cheek manifesto "Personism," Frank O'Hara says "only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies." He was clearly kidding around, but in all seriousness, the poems in Somali-American poet Ladan Osman's debut collection, "The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony," are by turns arguably as good as and even better than watching a film. In his foreword, editor Kwame Dawes writes that Osman writes "with a capacity for physical detail in the cinematic sense and beyond — things a cinema can't offer us easily, physical texture and scent."
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, jointly published by the University of Nebraska Press and Amalion Press in Senegal, Osman's collection is alive with a love of language, sensory imagery and well-timed metaphor, as in "First Red Dress" when one of the speaker's male family members warns her: "Go out in that dress / and you'll get split like a watermelon. Down there."
This book is stunning because of the beauty of Osman's words from a craft perspective, but also because of the fierceness of her desire to interrogate such issues as racial politics, violence against women and the struggles of being an immigrant. No matter their subject, her poems are amazingly human and frequently funny, even when they seek, as the title suggests, to testify.
"Silhouette," the opening poem, is prefaced by the note "at a Claudia Rankine reading, University of Chicago, 2011." Even if a reader does not recall how outspoken Rankine was being at that time about problematic racial statements in the work of the poet Tony Hoagland, or does not know Rankine's work then and since then, Osman's poem is clear in its honest exploration of inequality. "I am afraid of them," she writes of the white academics she encounters in this milieu, "their smell, / their cotton, their expensive running shoes, / their faces so hard to read / when they make odd-placed sighs / at black people histories. There is not one / bright color." Here and throughout she sets a scene and places her persona in it, then moves from description to interrogation: "My voice is small as it asks, / What will it matter to them if I make a book? / I am one poet. Isn't there space for me?"
Interrogation is Osman's fiercest mode. She uses questions to invite the reader to consider the thin membrane between witness and participant, between the decision to document and the effort to affect, and how the question (as a noun) and the act of questioning (as a verb) carry a person back and forth, almost osmotically, between the two roles. "I am sorry for you, I tell her" she writes of a doll in the poem "Ordinary Heaven," adding "You witness but don't testify." Osman does both — and a great deal more.
The collection is structured so that elegant writing and testimony go hand in hand, as when the poem "Denotation" — in which the speaker's father tells her "This is a n—. If anyone ever calls you that, / knock their teeth out" — is followed by "Connotation," in which "the woman whose hair is like down spits near my shoe and says, / 'This neighborhood has changed since these people came' / I can't say, 'You are the spitter; you are the trash.'"
And that perhaps is what makes this book so immensely satisfying: that it is, in a sense, a long, smart, sharp, relentless opus of l'esprit d'escalier — the things a person wants to and should say in the face of insult in the moment, but usually doesn't think of until being on the stairs on the way out. Put another way, the poems are essentially a collection of answers, in various voices, to the question posed by her epigraph from Whitman's "Song of Myself": "What living and buried speech is always vibrating here … what howls restrained by decorum?" In a world that too often plugs its ears to voices it thinks unworthy, Osman shows that it's actually more inappropriate to be decorous.
In his tongue-in-cheek manifesto "Personism," Frank O'Hara says "only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies." He was clearly kidding around, but in all seriousness, the poems in Somali-American poet Ladan Osman's debut collection, "The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony," are by turns arguably as good as and even better than watching a film. In his foreword, editor Kwame Dawes writes that Osman writes "with a capacity for physical detail in the cinematic sense and beyond — things a cinema can't offer us easily, physical texture and scent."
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, jointly published by the University of Nebraska Press and Amalion Press in Senegal, Osman's collection is alive with a love of language, sensory imagery and well-timed metaphor, as in "First Red Dress" when one of the speaker's male family members warns her: "Go out in that dress / and you'll get split like a watermelon. Down there."
This book is stunning because of the beauty of Osman's words from a craft perspective, but also because of the fierceness of her desire to interrogate such issues as racial politics, violence against women and the struggles of being an immigrant. No matter their subject, her poems are amazingly human and frequently funny, even when they seek, as the title suggests, to testify.
"Silhouette," the opening poem, is prefaced by the note "at a Claudia Rankine reading, University of Chicago, 2011." Even if a reader does not recall how outspoken Rankine was being at that time about problematic racial statements in the work of the poet Tony Hoagland, or does not know Rankine's work then and since then, Osman's poem is clear in its honest exploration of inequality. "I am afraid of them," she writes of the white academics she encounters in this milieu, "their smell, / their cotton, their expensive running shoes, / their faces so hard to read / when they make odd-placed sighs / at black people histories. There is not one / bright color." Here and throughout she sets a scene and places her persona in it, then moves from description to interrogation: "My voice is small as it asks, / What will it matter to them if I make a book? / I am one poet. Isn't there space for me?"
Interrogation is Osman's fiercest mode. She uses questions to invite the reader to consider the thin membrane between witness and participant, between the decision to document and the effort to affect, and how the question (as a noun) and the act of questioning (as a verb) carry a person back and forth, almost osmotically, between the two roles. "I am sorry for you, I tell her" she writes of a doll in the poem "Ordinary Heaven," adding "You witness but don't testify." Osman does both — and a great deal more.
The collection is structured so that elegant writing and testimony go hand in hand, as when the poem "Denotation" — in which the speaker's father tells her "This is a n—. If anyone ever calls you that, / knock their teeth out" — is followed by "Connotation," in which "the woman whose hair is like down spits near my shoe and says, / 'This neighborhood has changed since these people came' / I can't say, 'You are the spitter; you are the trash.'"
And that perhaps is what makes this book so immensely satisfying: that it is, in a sense, a long, smart, sharp, relentless opus of l'esprit d'escalier — the things a person wants to and should say in the face of insult in the moment, but usually doesn't think of until being on the stairs on the way out. Put another way, the poems are essentially a collection of answers, in various voices, to the question posed by her epigraph from Whitman's "Song of Myself": "What living and buried speech is always vibrating here … what howls restrained by decorum?" In a world that too often plugs its ears to voices it thinks unworthy, Osman shows that it's actually more inappropriate to be decorous.
June 17, 2015
I'd like to begin by quoting a review from the Chicago Tribune, because I think it says what I most want to say succinctly: "the beauty of Osman's words from a craft perspective, but also because of the fierceness of her desire to interrogate such issues as racial politics, violence against women and the struggles of being an immigrant. No matter their subject, her poems are amazingly human and frequently funny, even when they seek, as the title suggests, to testify."
This collection is a dream, because the language is lulling, but the content heartbreaking, and thought provoking. I feel that each reading unveils more. There are many reasons that Osman is on many lists of poets to watch, and I know I will be. Also, she is just a delightful person.
This collection is a dream, because the language is lulling, but the content heartbreaking, and thought provoking. I feel that each reading unveils more. There are many reasons that Osman is on many lists of poets to watch, and I know I will be. Also, she is just a delightful person.
September 2, 2018
despite being published in 2015, this is my 'if you're only gonna read one book of poetry this year, read this one' book
December 31, 2018
She is AMAZING in reading her poetry and her words still come alive on the printed page. *goosebumps*
February 15, 2018
I finalllyyyyy got around to reading Ladan Osman's Kitchen Dweller's Testimony -- came across her poem on Narrative Magazine, fell in loveeee, but never got to read her first poetry book a year later because it got published when I moved to Myanmar and I reFUUUSEEE to read poetry on kindle. But after waiting and waiting, I just decided what the heck better something than nothing, so I caved and its been waterworks and feeling my core fall through, even through the butchered medium of kindle reformatting (which is zero formatting, spacing, etc agghh!! the fury and frustration). Desperatteelllyyyy wishing I could read it in its print form though... I must!!!!!
February 11, 2024
I undressed madness and cannot unwelcome my lust for her
-From "The Pilgrims"
Read many of these multiple times, like unpeeling an onion. Osman's phrasing and word choices were wholly unique. I loved the way she captured fleeting moments of vulnerability in so many of the poems.
-From "The Pilgrims"
Read many of these multiple times, like unpeeling an onion. Osman's phrasing and word choices were wholly unique. I loved the way she captured fleeting moments of vulnerability in so many of the poems.
August 27, 2020
Stories to meditate on, the language both excites and astounds.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews