INTERACTIVE
FLUX · Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading
Tarfia Faizullah
Tarfia Faizullah's oeuvre is one of poetic attunement to how the temporalities of violence at various scales—be it the mass rape and torture of women in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 or the colonial plunder of cultural artifacts—are linked with crimes of intimacy at the most personal and private level. Eliding cliche, her work is connected by a searching fury at unjust banalities.
FLUX: An Evening in Dissent
A selection of readings by Tarfia Faizullah served as a gentle, immersive break between panels. Faizullah read excerpts from her poetry collections Registers of Illuminated Villages and Seam and the experimental poem Alien of Extraordinary Ability, which we published earlier that year.
“Is this a museum or a border? where there / is a border, does there need to be patrol?” Faizullah muses in Alien of Extraordinary Ability, a startling and experimental work shifting slowly from a visa alien classification by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) federal agency to the vicissitudes of borders, abuse, and plunder simultaneously intimate and global: speaking with one voice, then with many, often within a single verse or phrase.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
AUTHOR
Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5
AUTHOR
Heading 5
Watch the event in full on IGTV.
Event
Dallas
Live
FLUX
Published Work
Poetry
Alien of Extraordinary Ability
Seam
Reading
Bangladeshi Diapora
Bangladesh
Immigration
Work Authorization
Borders
Visa
TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Tarfia is currently based in Dallas.