Skip to main navigation Skip to main content

Graywolf Press is proud to announce a series of events throughout 2024 celebrating fifty years of adventurous publishing, featuring debut and longstanding authors and taking place in New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Chicago, and Tucson. More here

Book Title

Registers of Illuminated Villages

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
Tarfia Faizullah
Poem Excerpt
Somebody is always singing. Songs
were not allowed. Mother said,
Dance and the bells will sing with you.
I slithered. Glass beneath my feet. I
locked the door. I did not
die. I shaved my head. Until the horns
I knew were there were visible.
Until the doorknob went silent.

—from “100 Bells”
Body
Registers of Illuminated Villages is Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices—elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages,” suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah is an essential new poet, whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and—even in its unsparing brutality—full of love. 

Share Title

List Price
$16.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-800-6
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
112
Trim Size
Trim Size
6.5 x 9
Keynote
“Tarfia Faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision.”—Natasha Trethewey

About the Author

Tarfia  Faizullah
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages and Seam, winner of a VIDA Award and a GLCA New Writers’ Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

http://www.tfaizullah.com/
More by author

Praise

  • Winner of the 2018 Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry
  • “In her fiercely original second collection, Tarfia Faizullah traverses the globe—northern Iraq; Flint, Mich.; West Texas; Bangladesh—and employs a range of formal experiments to illuminate acts of resistance in the face of injustice and violence.”Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
  • “Faizullah’s entire collection—powerful, wide-ranging—is an affirmation, an accomplished second book.”The Millions
  • “Faizullah is an essential poet for our times.”The Rumpus
Back to Table of Contents