In this English-language debut, Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005) drew upon the lineage of Persian and Sufi writing and her life under Taliban rule, attending to love, oppression, myth, and devotion through lyrics that embrace and resist tradition. Anjuman grew up in the Herat, Afghanistan—a city known for its poetry for centuries. While the Taliban was in power, Anjuman met with other women in a needlepoint school to secretly discuss literature. She went on to attend university and write two celebrated volumes of poetry—selections from which are presented here for the first time in English—before her early death due to domestic violence. Smoke Drifts was edited by Diana Arterian and was co-translated by Arterian and Marina Omar. The collection, which was a finalist for the Wisconsin Poetry in Translation Prize, is introduced by award-winning poet and novelist Aria Aber.
Praise
Nadia Anjuman’s poetry in Diana Arterian and Marina Omar’s masterful translation is a testament to the liberating power of poetry and translation to inspire hope and resilience in the face of adversity and injustice. —Fatemeh Shams
Anjuman’s biography is so iconic, so tragic, that it tends to distract us from the depth and brilliance of her work. Here is a poet who had mastered Persian’s classical and modern poetics, its forms, imagery, tropes, rhythms, and historical resonances. In these ghazals and free verse poems we find the patient stone, the caged bird, the green garden of hope blighted, the desire for a Beloved denied, all reworked in the context of twenty-first century Afghanistan. With passion, irony, and anger she distills that literary heritage, and the beauty and constraints of her life, into poems of ferocious and devastating precision. A voice with power to be reckoned with, and thus silenced in her time. —Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
Et cetera
Excerpts
Apogee
Arkansas International
Asymptote
Aufgabe
Brooklyn Rail
Circumference
Exchanges
Gulf Coast
North American Review
Poet Lore
Two Lines
Etc.
- Flor de Fumo, Portuguese translation by Regina Guimarães based on this collection (Exclamação, 2022)
- Poems forthcoming in Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets anthology, ed. Sarah Coolidge. (Two Lines Press Calico Series, 2025).
- “Anjuman Songs” by Reena Esmail