Description
Book SynopsisThis collection of poems examines the varied ways women navigate gender roles, while examining praise for success within roles where imagination about female ability is limited.
The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.
Trade Review"In a world that too often plugs its ears to voices it thinks unworthy, Osman shows that it's actually more inappropriate to be decorous."—Kathleen Rooney,
Chicago Tribune"Ladan Osman conveys a language and logic that is disturbingly fresh; it leaps from one observation to another and speaks familiarly yet obliquely enough to make us listen a little harder."—Wesley Rothman,
Rain Taxi“I have rarely encountered a young poet whose work was so completely its own thing, was so little influenced by what trend might be elbowing itself forward on the writing campuses. 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 reader’s heart, with frank and candid expression, with unaffected wonder.”—from Ted Kooser’s preface to Ladan Osman’s chapbook,
Ordinary Heaven
“[Ladan Osman] writes out of a passion for language, out of a compelling pleasure and challenge in the potential of the voice to humanize us, or perhaps even better, to affirm our humanity. Osman is a warrior poet, and she is dangerous because she is especially gifted and disciplined about her craft, her technical facility with the poem. This collection offers numerous examples of this skillfulness.”—from the foreword by Kwame Dawes
“True visionary poets are very rare. Ladan Osman is one. What she sees is extraordinary, and needful.”—Brigit Pegeen Kelly, author of
Song and
The OrchardTable of Contents Foreword by Kwame Dawes
Acknowledgments
Silhouette
I
Ordinary Heaven
Words We Lost in the Water
Unsolicited Witness
To Abel
Sugar
Section 8
The Key
First Red Dress
Admonitions
Twigs
Verse of Hairs
My Father Drops His Larynx
Denotation
Connotation
Parable of the Leaf
How to Make a Shadow
II
Intangible Quality
Women Brewing
Diviner of Teacups
The Kitchen-Dweller Presents Evidence
Trouble
Her House Is the Middle East
That Which Scatters and Breaks Apart
Invocation
The Kitchen-Dweller’s Interlude
The Kitchen-Dweller Testifies
Desertion
The Offended Tongue
When the Fire Is Not Enough
Clearing the Land
Situations Wanted
The Figures
Convoluted Mattress
Water
For the Woman Whose Love Is a Bird of Passage
The Man Who Puts Dirt on His Head
III
The Glass Images
To the Angel of Accounts on a Holy Night
Tonight
Visitant
The Pilgrims
Woman, Ego, Shadow
The Woman in the Field
Gnats
Apparition One, Apparition Two
Amber Doll
Ken
Hotel Party
Princess Di in an Afterlife
My Brother Receives His Kingdom under a Tree
Proud Flesh
The Albatross Holds a Note in Her Bill
The Trumpet Testifies
Following the Horn’s Call
The Beetle
A Dove Sings for Young Lovers
Western Gate
