Frieda, O Frieda something's gone wrong in the North Eman Hassan is a bicultural poet from Massachusetts and Kuwait. She is the recipient of an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University and a PhD in poetry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has worked as International Poetry Editor at Hayden's Ferry Review and as an Associate Editor at Prairie Schooner. Her poems and poetry translations have appeared in Blackbird, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mizna, and Aldus Journal of Translation, among others. She lives with her husband Patrick outside of Portland, Oregon.

Books by Eman Hassan:

Other poems on the web by Eman Hassan:
Two poems
Two poems
"For"

About Raghead:

"Then there is the lyricism of the desert night: neighbors' boys with their blue tongues are hanging from silver lamp posts; girls are forced to serve while dressed in nothing but shackles, women indeed are being raped in an evil oceanic clamoring across an entire war-zone—and Eman Hassan is the gifted journalist to all this suffering; she asks like the moon, that seen too much in a single night, for clouds to cover the unscented, adverted experience with a healing of water that is pure like prayer. I could never exaggerate the importance of this necessary book. It is virtually haunting!"
—Norman Dubie

"Eman Hassan is a veteran of the first Iraq War. The daughter of a Kuwaiti father and an American mother, her multi-cultural background and experiences on the ground give her a unique perspective on the ongoing upheavals in the Middle East. In these finely-crafted poems she sings 'between / the dipthongs of one language / and another' simultaneously critiquing some aspects of Kuwaiti culture and correcting the stereotypes held by too many in the West. Raghead is a powerful, timely, and necessary book."
—Grace Bauer

"While the poems in Eman Hassan's Raghead are clearly spoken, their elegant contours will surprise you as you are taken back and forth between the war-torn country of Kuwait and the speaker's second home in the United States. You will witness the before and the after burning of a city, of time, and of many selves shifting and grasping for a sense that humanity still cares for itself. Identities are constructed and deconstructed, some but not all made new or whole again. Although your eye will take in experiences you wouldn't have expected, you will more than likely hear these spaces as your own consciousness, and most likely for the first time, across time. You may even wonder if you are half-dreaming. There is a suffusion of the sacred in a number of these poems as well, a hope and a peace in the midst of adversity and crisis, a transference, if you will, between the letter of the poems and the spirit of the poems. This is a forthright collection written in the most 'uncovered' style possible, giving you the themes that connect time with the pressures of being—someone and no one in particular in a remembered Now."
—Jeannine Savard