Aria Aber

Aria Aber is a poet and writer based in Oakland, California. She was raised in Germany, where she was born to Afghan refugees. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review, and she has received awards and fellowships from Kundiman, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Whiting Foundation. Aber was the spring 2020 Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College.

Reception

Hard Damage

Her first full-length collection Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, was published in September 2019 by University of Nebraska Press. In a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Claire Schwartz wrote, "Hard Damage — which elaborates a constellation of beauty and terror between Afghanistan, Germany, and the United States — is vexed by the meanings of bringing across." In an interview at The Yale Review, Aber has stated, "Especially the English language is political, because it has operated as a colonizing force in many places around the world, and changed global indigenous languages forever, if not completely eradicated them. If poetry is “the soul of a nation” (this quote is attributed to T.S. Eliot, though I cannot fact-check the source), and our nation is an empire actively participating in displacement and warfare, it feels only natural to me that these topics surface in poetry."