LOW FLYING PLANES

“At its best, poetry shapes, from the voices and experiences of our people, our homelands, and ourselves, an approach to language that is revivifying and radically inventive. The poems of Hajjar Baban’s LOW FLYING PLANES do just that, navigating a landscape and a self composed of shards born of multigenerational displacement and violence. ‘She worries about which life / to birth, which meaning to speak,’ Baban writes, and that engine of worry, in balance with the will to speak, the pulse and ingenuity of her syntax, and the design of the fragments of narrative to which she has sporadic access, are the keys to her superb artistry.”

“I look to experience the world through the lens of a poem. Not because I long to step into another’s shoes, but because I hope for the light to be slanted when and after I read. I want to leave a book of poems altered in some way. Hajjar Baban’s LOW FLYING PLANES stayed with me for weeks after I finished it, and it all began with the rocks. ‘Rocks made in my body / against reason, against beauty,’ Baban writes. This collection proves that poems can hold immense beauty, history, and region, and that if language is to be made whole, if tradition is to be made whole, if memory, if truth, it begins with a book like this. I’m eager for the world to enter this one and emerge on the other side transformed, into a place where words are both nourished and at stake. I’m eager for this poet, for a new voice that asks us to change. It is my honor to introduce this marvelous work.”