Exiles of Eden

(Paperback)

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• These poems are a lyrical and illuminative response to problems of gender, race, colonialism, and displacement, and they are as serious artistically as they are politicallya perfect fit for the CHP list.
• Ladans work is informed by the long tradition of Somali poetry, and shes invested in making that poetry available to English readers through her own work. Very little Somali poetry appears in English, and her perspective is one that CHP is excited to bring to readers.
• Ladan is a poets poetshe has a lot of admirers who take her work very seriously, but her work also has broad appeal and will resonate with the readers of younger poets like Hieu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, Fatimah Asghar, and Justin Phillip Reed.

Reviews

Winner of a 2021 Whiting Award
Winner of the 2020 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry

Ladan Osmans dazzling and incisive poetry creates vibrant connections between generations of women, between the self and history, and between our bodies and the natural world. Whiting Awards Judges' Citation

A generous, rooted, and humbly adamant quest for agency. Publisher's Weekly

A stellar collection . . . in this political moment charged with so much frustration and sorrow, Exiles of Eden offers the triumph we all need.World Literature Today

Osman delivers an incredibly urgent call to action against founding narratives that are so prevalent in American society, and which are poisonous to women and people of color. Africa is a Country

Exile here is a daily longing, a gift and curse of an outsider eye, an experience that grapples with the word relative in all its meanings.The Adirondack Review

Ladan Osman has an abundance of talent, and she is one of kind. There is informed wisdom to her poetry, which, on top of being moving, inspires the reader with positive thinking. A wonderful collection.Nuruddin Farah

Ladan Osman is a poet of wonder and inquiry. Her wonder is muscular and thorough, and requires an inventory of the known, a charting of what is lost, and the incantation of desire. In her second full-length collection,Exiles of Eden,even the presumed paradisial qualities of the garden before the fall are called into question. The marriage, the homelands, the underworlds that exile Osmans speakers must be named, circumscribed, and if possible, released, or if not, borne along the curves of the body. Exile demands better myths, demands letting go of our half-life, that her speakers may . . . make so many things. Here there is pain and music and thirst and the refusal to bend into a narrative these women have not shapedfor themselves.Donika Kelly

Ladan Osman is one of the most alive minds in poetry today. Under her supreme gaze, the ordinary is allowed safe passage into strangeness and the surreal is domesticated without losing its innate chaos. Whether with the pen or with the lens, everything is lifted to a higher, fantastic dimension in the frame of Osmans looking.Exiles of Edenscares me. Its that good. I didnt know you could do with language what Osman does, but thank the gods she did.Danez Smith

Pain is not located in an identifiable muscle only, but in a person, a relationship, all to a living. Ladan Osman can identify the physical muscles of an emotion as well as the pain come of the lack of its exercise: the lack of a sisters companionship, missing a mother, missing the love in a marriage. The pain of not belonging becomes more than the place. She does the remarkable thing of detailing pain as places of departure, from a marriage, from a country. Places of departure from justice, from morality, from humanity itself follow. The book concludes in a ceremony of restoration well worth witnessing. Her journey will show itself to have been toward a necessary insight. Not the most painless route, but an excellent book of poems.Ed Roberson

Praise for Ladan Osman

In a world that too often plugs its ears to voices it thinks unworthy, Osman shows that its actually more inappropriate to be decorous.Chicago Tribune

True visionary poets are very rare. Ladan Osman is one. What she sees is extraordinary, and needful.Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Osman is a worldly and acutely sensitive writer who knows how to reach right through the sequined veil of fashion and put her hand squarely on the readers heart, with frank and candid expression, with unaffected wonder.Ted Kooser

Osman is a warrior poet, and she is dangerous because she is especially gifted and disciplined about her craft.Kwame Dawes

Author Bio

Somali-born poet and essayist Ladan Osman is the author of The Kitchen-Dwellers Testimony (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize, and the chapbook Ordinary Heaven, which appeared in the box-set Seven New Generation African Poets (Slapering Hol Press, 2014). Her next collection, Exiles of Eden, a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2019.