Sahar Muradi is a writer, performer, and educator born in Afghanistan and raised in the U.S. / is co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature / is co-founder of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association / has published most recently in Bone Bouquet and Dusie / is a recipient of the 2016 Stacy Doris Memorial Poetry Award, a Kundiman Poetry Fellowship, and an AAWW Open City Fellowship / directs the poetry programs at City Lore / and believes in the bottom of the rice pot.

Books by Sahar Muradi:

Other poems on the web by Sahar Muradi:
Two poems

Sahar Muradi's Website.

Sahar Muradi on Twitter.

About [ G A T E S ]:

"These charged, elliptical poems make space for the unknown and unknowable, even as they vividly summon the tangible body of the world. Shot through with sudden glimpses of violence and beauty, Sahar Muradi's poems refuse us comfort or closure. They offer only what is—yet, paradoxically, haunt us with the sense that we're standing on holy ground."
—Joan Larkin

"I get the sense reading Sahar Muradi's richly layered and quietly transformative poems that what's there is all that has to be there, that the poetry depends on nothing outside of the various shapes it takes, and that complex life conditions and feeling spaces are in a constant dance with certainty and doubt at all points, always on the move. There is an unfettered, inviting, and wryly unconventional voice at work in [ G A T E S ], one capable of making the necessarily enigmatic turns scale demands when distances known and felt on numerous levels have to be closed in on. These poems animate and search through multiple lived-in centers that are real and imagined simultaneously, always open, and always irreducible."
—Anselm Berrigan

"If you open Sahar Muradi's [ G A T E S ] and follow each line into the entryways and departures, passed 'convention centers and expos / and festivals that begin at sunset,' you will witness the poet's memories as tiny explosions of intimacies that devastate with their precision and candor. On images of Ferris wheels and 'prayer on the side of the road,' the poet 'kneels and spreads [her] picnic' of wonder. Sahar Muradi makes sense of the fragments of memory, the broken buildings of Kabul, Mazar, and Panjsher, the innocence of childhood punctured by journey, a father's illness, losing a language, and the politics of a war uninvited. Muradi beckons you, asks how you 'authored poorer nations with the hope of freeing / others. The architects of what's left.' Indeed the political act of poetry in this fierce collection is a pained beauty that does not look away as it rebuilds the human starting with the heart."
—Rajiv Mohabir