Hard Damage

by Aria Aber

Hard Damage works to relentlessly interrogate the self and its shortcomings. In lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments, Aria Aber explores the historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations. Drawing on material dating back to the 1950s, she considers the consequences of these relations—in particular the funding of the Afghan mujahedeen, which led to the Taliban and modern-day Islamic terrorism—for her family and the world at large.

Invested in and suspicious of the pain of family and the shame of selfhood, the speakers of these richly evocative and musical poems mourn the magnitude of citizenship as a state of place and a state of mind. While Hard Damage is framed by free-verse poetry, the middle sections comprise a lyric essay in fragments and a long documentary poem. Aber explores Rilke in the original German, the urban melancholia of city life, inherited trauma, and displacement on both linguistic and environmental levels, while employing surrealist and eerily domestic imagery.
 

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Womens, Politics, 21st Century, Contemporary, Germany

102 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2019

Reviews

[Natalie Eilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard Damage by Aria Aber is and will remain a book I keep close to my chest. Aber navigates language through proximities, whether in the mishearing of bombs for "balms" or in Widderuf with Rilke or in the rupture of country in the midst of regime changes. Few collections are able to accomplish what Aber accomplishes in Hard Damage. Her words are imperiled by beauty of witness and the existential relationship to diaspora. She demands the origins of which she was deprived, writing poems about Wisconsin by its pre-colonized name of Meskonsing, knowing there is no word for "home" in Dari, the glimmering image of Kabul—her foremost idea of home—at the mercy of decadeslong invasion and occupation. Reading these lines, we feel the heat of her politics, but this is also a poet so ensorcelled to verse that I believe, briefly once more, that we deserve new ambassadors of the world. Aria Aber would surely be one. Seriously, read this book. It is one of the best debut collections I've ever read.

[ayşe · Rating 5 out of 5]

im speechless the second half is actually perfect and some of the best poems I've ever read i loved rilke and i its so unique and interesting and beautiful.... im in love with aria abers mind and i need to reread this as soon as i can ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ please read this its incredible!!!!!!! diaspora poetry at its best

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

ummmm this was so mind-alteringly beautiful and definitely deserved a more compressed reading period, so this star rating is a placeholder until i can hold this in physical form and reread. definitely a collection too vast and intelligent for me to fully appreciate on a first pass; so many languages in this, so many predecessors familial and artistic/political, so much of history probed and complicated!!!!! i love aria aber's brain.

some personal favorites:

What once was feathered like a voice, a seduction / of finches, now is vigorous, bids me into the sun.

—

Just the scent of uterus (wet dog / and sandalwood) and the bee-funeral burning / on my compost heap remain.

—

To hear a droning in the distance and not suffer a sudden execution of your center, but think of bees drowned in jars of raspberry jam, their dead husks on the windowsill all summer, sweat pooling under your shirt, between your legs, face against the hum of the fan.

—

the price, we think, the price was worth it said Albright about Iraqi child casualties / the prophet with the face of light / the sequined, heavy velvet of our mothers’ good dresses / the smell of grass in his hair after rolling in meadows / the unimaginable god / the terrible time to be alive.

—

Even I, with my old-world passport / and earflap hat, am settling, / at least, on what it means / to be American, walking / by the cattle pasture, which, / poisoned by a faulty protein, / has turned the buttery grass / a psychedelic blue.

[Jatan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bonded over the ‘brown kid with German last name’ connection while browsing through the neighborhood indie bookstore.

Loved the poems, especially the section that plays on the Rilke quote* — Lass dir Alles geschehen: Schönheit und Schrecken (Tr: Let everything happen to you: Beauty and Terror).

* which seems to have recently entered the broader cultural consciousness through JoJo Rabbit.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars

A true 5 star read. This collection is astounding! As cohesive as it is challenging, it's one of those books that makes you feel privileged as a reader.

It's one of the most compelling books I've read about the experience of diaspora; Aber was born in Germany to Afghan refugees and later immigrated to the US. She feels simultaneously connected to and distanced from her family's homeland. Aber expertly weaves between English and German to fill in the weak spots of each language and illuminate new ideas. Several images recur throughout the collection, including her mother's time in prison and green eyes, carrying the reader from poem to poem while fostering a sense of urgency.

There are a couple of longer poem sequences that are quite ambitious in concept, but Aber pulls them off with aplomb. I especially appreciated the section inspired by Rilke’s most famous quote, “Let everything happen to you: Beauty and Terror ... No feeling is final.” Aber takes each word from the quote, explores the etymology in English and Deutsch, and uses that etymology as a jumping-off point to explore familial relation and personal history.

There's an element of surprise (sometimes shock) to her writing that continually astounded me. Several of the poems put me in the mind of Sylvia Plath's work, so I was pleased to see Aber give her a shoutout in the Notes, calling Plath "eternal goddess." Yes!

"Funeral in Paris" is one of the best poems I've ever read, full stop. A complete masterpiece from the first line to the last. I happened to see it RT'd into my Twitter timeline a few weeks ago and was inspired to order the full collection, and I'm so glad I did.

I cannot recommend this collection strongly enough! Take your time with it--I know I did.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

6 stars. Tell me what the frickityfrackity was in this book. Tell me why I cannot write like this. It was so much more about the feeling than words. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way about someone else’s writing—or maybe I have, but now I’m realizing that those feelings were small and compressed and incomparable to how I’m feeling after having read this book. Reading each poem, I felt like I understood it before I even actually went to process it. It’s like when your mom gives you a look and you intuitively know what it means before having to ask yourself what it means; I understood how each poem wanted me to feel before knowing what every line was trying to say. Her poetry reminds me a lot of Louise Glück’s, specifically the way in which the language is minimalistic yet emotional—able to gush through you quickly but in a way that isn’t overpowering. Everyone at camp was raving about her, and I totally get the hype. What a read—and definitely worth rereading as well.

“Who’d loiter around cricks / glistening with oil, which, once gone, / will, like death, at last, democratize / us all?”

“I did not choose her eyes. Did not / choose to masticate the ash of witness, / her crooked smile disclosing a swarm of flies…”

“There’s no geometry to language, but in America, / alien / borders me and everyone and I love.”

“This is how it is about us: / you flee into metaphor but you return / with another moth / flapping inside your throat.”

“How unaware / that yearning would be / the only currency that awaited / us, out there, in the arboretum / of this language / that was, exactly / like the glacial loneliness / of childhood, never-ending, / feral, the only house we’d ever own.”

“And the living did / what they do: they tasked / themselves with the cruelty of song, with braiding / questions they don’t have / the stomach to hear answers to.”

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. The long poems/sequences are really great. Loved the way this book built up across the reading experience.

[Josephine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you, Vibha!

Azalea, Azalea / Dream with Horse / Can you describe your years in prison?

[Cardenio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brutal y hermoso.

[Ivy Rockmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most incredible poetry collection I’ve ever read. I devoured this. Aber is so talented and I cannot wait to read her debut novel!

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is absolutely brilliant. I will reread it again and again.

[Carly Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Already one of my favorite collections of 2020, and perhaps one of my favorite debuts of all time. Aria Aber's poetry reminded me of the magic of language--how we can subvert syntax and look at language as tactile and fluid all at once.

[ocelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

talk to me about Home

[Alycia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is an astounding debut - Aria Aber writes in a seamless style that makes surprising and momentous lyrical moves feel effortless. I loved the journey I went on while reading this book. Every poem in this collection is my favourite poem.

[Caroliena Cabada · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It is a terrible time / to be alive. // I say this with the privilege / of being alive."

A stunning collection, both in the beautiful sense and in the immobilized sense. I am in awe of Aber's ability to speak plainly about hurt and small comforts.

[carolina · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Terrence Mifsud · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cannot put into words how good this book is! A must-read!!!!

[danny liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely stunningly gorgeous, aria aber shocks at every line, grips every single tendon in ur body, wish I could forget so I could read it again for the first time

[Sandra Del Rio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my mother

[Chris Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

Vampires
Assemble
On the other side of daylight
To die again
Paradise, ruthlessly, all around us.

#poem

Chris Roberts, Patron Saint to the Vertigo People

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are books that arrive as if they’ve been waiting for the world to catch up to them, and there are books that arrive with the unnerving sense that the world will never catch up at all. “Hard Damage,” Aria Aber’s debut collection, belongs to the second category. Not because it is obscure, but because it refuses the conveniences that let readers feel clean at the end of an encounter with suffering. It is a book about war and the way war hides in ordinary nouns, about exile and the way exile persists in the mouth long after the passport is stamped, about the body as both evidence and instrument, and about the uneasy ethics of turning any of that into beauty.

Aber writes from a life triangulated between Afghanistan, Germany, and the United States, yet she does not arrange these coordinates into a reassuring narrative of departure, arrival, and redemption. Her imagination moves by collision. A poem opens in the domestic and suddenly exposes a policy beneath the floorboards. A sentence begins as intimacy and ends as indictment. The mind in these pages keeps turning the object over, asking what it costs to look, what it costs to look away, and what it means to insist on naming what power prefers to keep unnamed.

The collection’s five-part structure matters because it stages a deepening argument about responsibility. The first section begins close to origin: hunger, cold, immigration, the small humiliations that harden into a worldview. In poems such as “First Snow” and “Asylum,” the world arrives as weather and infrastructure, as the cramped logic of paperwork and waiting, as a room that teaches the body what it is worth. Aber’s gift is to make deprivation tactile without turning it into spectacle. Snow dazzles and also salts; it can be beauty and it can be a sentence. The poems know how easily a reader can romanticize hardship from a distance, so they keep returning to the stubborn material facts: where the body sleeps, how it is fed, what it is denied, what it is forced to translate.

If the first section establishes the body’s circumstances, it also introduces the book’s gravitational figure: the mother. Aber’s mother is not a saintly emblem of sacrifice, nor a purely private character whose story can be cordoned off from politics. She is a living consequence. The poems return to her imprisonment, her faith and fatigue, her voice and silence, not as sentimental center but as moral fulcrum. The daughter’s devotion is fierce and complicated, and the book is brave enough to admit that love is not a purity test. Love contains resentment. Love contains helplessness. Love contains the desire to rescue and the knowledge that rescue is often impossible. The mother becomes not only a person but a measure: a reminder that history is not abstract when it has a face you can’t forget.

That refusal of consolation gives the early poems their electricity. Even when a piece turns toward intimacy – a lover’s hand, a family gathering, the texture of daily life – history does not politely wait in another room. It sits down at the table. The speaker’s American life is never permitted to be merely American; it is lived under the glare of elsewhere, under the knowledge that comfort is unevenly distributed and sometimes purchased with someone else’s terror. Aber does not perform guilt. Instead, she performs accuracy: an insistence that private life does not float above policy, that desire does not absolve the state, that tenderness does not erase what is done in our names.

Section II drifts deeper into interior weather. Here, the poems become more unstable formally, more willing to fracture, to let associations show their seams. If Section I is anchored by scenes of origin and direct address, Section II is driven by aftermath: how trauma metabolizes into appetite, refusal, erotic life, shame. Aber’s attention turns to the body as a site of conflict – not only the inherited body of exile, but the female body that is both desired and disciplined, and the mind’s uneasy urge to use art as shelter. The poems do not claim that the personal is political as a slogan; they demonstrate it as a condition. A memory of touch is inseparable from a memory of threat. A sentence about beauty carries a second sentence inside it: Who is allowed beauty, and at what cost?

This is also where Aber begins to converse with tradition, not as ornament but as pressure. “Reading Rilke in Berlin” does not borrow prestige; it stages an encounter between a European lyric inheritance and a life shaped by modern empire. “At the Hospital, My Language” turns illness into a grammar lesson, the body’s vulnerability braided to the instability of address. “Sisterhood” makes kinship feel both tender and feral, a pact formed in the presence of death. The effect is not of erudition for its own sake, but of a speaker trying to locate a place to stand: within language, within lineage, within art. If these poems reach toward other writers, it is because other writers become a kind of scaffolding. But Aber is too skeptical to let the scaffolding become a hiding place.

The collection’s conceptual center is Section III, a sequence that reads like a lyric essay in shards, built around Rainer Maria Rilke’s injunction to let “beauty and terror” happen. Aber does not treat the line as a talisman. She worries it, translates it, interrogates its grammar as if grammar were destiny. The pieces are titled with bilingual pivots – “ich / I,” “Lass / Let,” “dir / You,” “Alles / All,” “Geschehn / Happen,” “Schönheit / Beauty,” “Und / And,” “Schrecken / Terror” – and each pivot becomes a hinge between languages, between moral positions, between ways of seeing. Translation here is not merely linguistic; it is ethical. Every shift in diction asks what is being carried across, what is being lost, what is being smuggled in under the guise of beauty.

What makes this section more than clever is its refusal to let intellect become insulation. Aber’s questions are not academic games; they are survival questions. If lyric poetry is a technology of attention, what happens when attention itself can be a luxury? Who gets to aestheticize terror as a soul’s education, and who lives terror as an unchosen condition? The sequence keeps asking what “let” means when the thing being let happen is not an existential weather but a historical event with architects. Aber’s engagement with Rilke is not a dismissal. It is something more painful and more intimate: an argument with a tradition she loves and mistrusts, a tradition that offers magnificence and also offers alibis.

Then comes the collection’s hardest pivot. Section IV opens with “Covert United States Involvement in Regime Change, I,” a ledger of dates, countries, coups. It is a daring move to place documentary enumeration inside a poetry collection and insist that this, too, is lyric material. The list functions as accusation and context, but also as a reminder of how quickly history becomes background noise. Reading it, one feels the numbness that repetition produces, and one also feels Aber refusing that numbness. The poem makes the reader confront the way violence becomes habitual, filed away, normalized, treated as the cost of a world order. It is difficult to read precisely because it refuses the reader’s usual escape routes.

At the center of Section IV is “Operation Cyclone,” broken into parts with mythic headings. Aber uses Greek myth not to elevate war into tragic grandeur, but to expose its repetitive machinery – gods as masks for appetites, for the persistence of violence across centuries, for the way power keeps finding new costumes. The sequence mixes the intimate and the bureaucratic, the sacred and the obscene, as if to show that modern states survive by borrowing any language that can make harm seem inevitable. Euphemism is one of the central villains of the book: the way killing becomes “operation,” the way terror becomes “collateral,” the way human lives become “assets” or “targets.” Aber’s poems keep putting those words in the reader’s mouth until the taste turns metallic.

There is risk in this approach. Myth can overdetermine meaning, smoothing specificity into allegory. Aber largely avoids the trap by keeping the poems’ textures stubbornly concrete and by returning, again and again, to the human scale of consequence. The mother appears here not as private figure but as historical witness, and her suffering is no longer merely an inherited ache; it is an event with causes. The book refuses to let readers rest in the comforting belief that tragedy is random. It insists that tragedy is often engineered, funded, explained away, and then forgotten. That insistence is the collection’s moral spine.

And yet “Hard Damage” is not simply an indictment. It is too alive to desire, too attentive to the compromised ways people continue anyway. Section V returns to lyric with a changed tempo. The poems in this final movement – “The First Toast,” “Nostos,” “Fata Morgana, 1987,” “Meskonsing,” “Operation Cyclone, Years Later,” “The Only Cab Service of Farmington, Maine,” “Inventory of Lost Conditionals” – feel like aftermath: not healing, exactly, but living-on. After the ledger and the long sequence, the voice sounds altered: sharpened, wearier, more intimate in its directness, less willing to flirt with abstraction. The poems behave like someone walking through a life whose floor has been damaged and repaired and damaged again.

Return, in this final section, is not romantic. “Nostos” gestures toward homecoming while refusing the fantasy of arrival. The mirage of return flickers, then breaks. The poems move through American landscapes that can feel oddly provisional – not hostile, exactly, but not fully sheltering either. There is a persistent sense of conditional citizenship: you can live here, you can speak here, you can love here, and still a headline can pull the floor out from under the sentence you thought you were inhabiting. Aber is especially good at capturing the way a life can be outwardly stable while inwardly braced for impact.

One of her achievements across the book is the refusal to separate the political from the intimate, as if one were the “real” subject and the other an overlay. In these poems, sex and war occupy the same room; pop reference and foreign policy share the same air; a shopping cart and an archive become neighbors. The effect can be disorienting, but it is purposeful. It mimics the way a life formed under displacement cannot keep its categories clean. Trauma is not scheduled. History does not stay in its lane. The lyric “I” is not a sealed chamber; it is porous, pressured, full of other voices, other languages, other headlines.

Aber’s style is barbed and musical. She loves the charged object: hair, snow, insects, stone, a plant on a windowsill. She loves etymology and lists, not as trivia but as a way of showing how ideology hides in plain sight. She is capable of direct address – to mother, to lover, to God, to reader – and she lets that directness risk embarrassment, which is another way of saying she lets it risk honesty. Her intelligence has texture. It is not merely referential; it is sensuous. When the poems are beautiful, they are beautiful with awareness, as if beauty itself has to answer for where it came from.

The book is also funny in flashes: not comedic, but possessing the quick, bleak wit that appears when a speaker refuses to sentimentalize pain. That wit matters because it keeps the poems from becoming pious. Aber’s stance is ethically fierce, but it is not sanctimonious. She knows the reader’s temptations – to admire the language and forget the bodies, to turn political history into an aesthetic atmosphere, to treat the speaker’s suffering as a moving performance – and she builds the poems so that those temptations are constantly interrupted. Admiration is allowed, but it cannot become a substitute for reckoning.

Technically, Aber is adept at shifting registers without announcing the shift. A poem can slide from the declarative into the lyric, from essay into prayer, from list into portrait, and the transitions feel less like tricks than like a mind testing its available tools. Her line breaks frequently function as ethical brakes, forcing the reader to hesitate where the sentence wants to glide. Silence becomes a form of punctuation. In a book so concerned with what language does to experience, the craft itself becomes part of the argument: the poems demonstrate how form can either anesthetize or awaken.

A great deal of the book’s power comes from its ear for official speech: the soothing bureaucratic tones that make violence administrable. Code names, timelines, and procedural phrasing recur not as mere reference, but as antagonists. Aber places the reader inside the diction that governs bodies from a distance, then punctures it with the irreducible facts of flesh and grief. Even when she writes in lush lyric, she keeps the reader aware of the paperwork humming underneath. The poems remind you that euphemism is not an aesthetic problem but an ethical one: it is the language that allows damage to be described without acknowledging the damaged.

That antagonism sharpens the book’s recurring question about permission. Who is granted the right to “let” something happen, and who is forced to endure what happens? In Aber’s hands, translation becomes more than a bilingual flourish; it becomes a moral drama. A word crosses languages and the stakes change with it: an imperative becomes suggestion, suggestion becomes command, command becomes an alibi. The speaker’s attention keeps returning to the places where grammar tries to absolve power, and her insistence on precision feels less like stylistic preference than like survival instinct.

Still, the collection���s strengths are inseparable from its demands. “Hard Damage” is not always hospitable. Its compression can feel airless; its allusions can, at times, create a gate that some readers will not want to pass through. There are moments when the poems prefer the hard clarity of naming to the softer pleasure of lingering, when the mind’s argumentative force slightly outpaces the heart’s willingness to be exposed. But this severity is not a moral failure. It is a consequence of ambition, and of an ethic that distrusts easy beauty in a world where beauty can be weaponized.

That distrust is what gives the collection its authority. Aber writes as someone who knows that language is never merely language – it is a border, a weapon, a lullaby, a headline, a prayer. If there is hope in these pages, it is not the hope of repair. It is the hope of accurate attention, of refusing euphemism, of insisting that the private and the political are braided so tightly that to read one without the other is a form of lying.

To rate “Hard Damage” at 87/100 is to acknowledge both its formidable accomplishment and its purposeful severity. The book is stunning in its reach and unwavering in its ethical posture, but it also withholds comforts many readers are trained to expect: narrative settlement, emotional release, the illusion of distance. Aber’s poems do not grant distance. They ask for proximity – to history, to family, to the residue that language carries when it crosses borders and comes back changed.

What lingers after the last page is not a message but a condition. The book leaves the reader inside a mind that has learned to be wary of beauty, not because beauty is false, but because beauty can be recruited. It can soften the conscience. It can teach us to accept what should be intolerable. Aber does not renounce lyric music; she insists on using it with the brakes on, as if every gorgeous image must pass an ethical inspection before it is allowed to remain.

In that sense, “Hard Damage” is a debut that does not behave like a debut. It does not ask for patience or for the indulgence we sometimes extend to early work. It arrives already in argument with the tradition that produced it, already fluent in the pleasures of lyric and already suspicious of them, already aware that the speaker’s “I” is never purely personal when history is pressed up against the teeth. It is a book that makes the reader more alert, less easily comforted, and therefore, in the best sense, more responsible.

[Sarkis Antonyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

it got better and better and better. this is poetry

[Teymour · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fine book, however, it’s evident the author doesn’t have a clear grasp of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit. Therefore, more educated readers may find the book tiring

[Aumaine Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lush, studied, often gorgeous. Interesting turns of phrase and use of research/documentarian poetics

[Melissa Seitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Brilliant.

[George Abraham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is nothing short of groundbreaking, and is one of my favorites of 2019. Every poem will leave you breathless (and just wait till you get to the abecedarian - you're not ready). Aria Aber has given us the future of SWANA lit.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of hermetic departure and homeless echo, Aria Aber’s Hard Damage is a work of deep citizenry in which words begin to sound like the words they were made for. Or from. I’m not sure. One moment I’m packing snowglobes in ash and the next I’m losing my footing while listening to a eulogy that distance has written for want. What landmark nostalgia. What shocked intimacy. Aber knows speech hides in the saying. Knows headline is a melancholy click twice removed from identity sorrow. There is no undoing in the doing. Revelation, here, is baked into the bone. If Aber’s imagery renders hypnosis a given, then this language has it go without. Be taken, reader. So covertly enspelled.

[n · Rating 5 out of 5]

constantly thinking about rilke & i. constantly.

[Sanjay Varma]

At this moment in literary history, readers eagerly seek memoirs and immigrant stories. (The poet has a German and Afghani background.)There is also a newer trend of choosing an old poet to be one’s inspiration, and writing a poem sequence to investigate the relationship. (She presents Rainier Maria Rilke as her muse.) Such books satisfy reader expectations: italicized foreign words, trauma, assimilation, very superficial geopolitical analysis, sprinkles of pidgin dialect, and juxtapositions between the West and the ancestral homeland. These poems check all the boxes, and I found them to be standard for this genre.

[Kiril · Rating 5 out of 5]

A new favorite poet!