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Fulbright fellow and three-time Pushcart Prize winner Tarfia Faizullah fantasizes a future free of colonization in her third poetry collection.
In Alien of Extraordinary Ability, Faizullah is compelled back into the past where her Bangladeshi parents are falling in love in New York as their homeland fights for freedom while looking toward their own future as parents against the backdrop of American policy changes in immigration. The speaker longs for a love and a home of her own—basic longings complicated by concerns of displacement, migration, and state violence.
These poems question the nature of love, and strive to honor and memorialize the beloveds already in Faizullah’s life: friends, family, artists, and art forms. She asks, “What is the cost of being high-achieving—exceptional, even—in a colonized world?”
Formally, Faizullah employs the sonnet, found forms, erasure, a word bank compiled only of words from the Immigration Act of 1965, and poems written within the confines of bureaucratic documents including the Alien of Extraordinary Ability visa application form.
In Alien of Extraordinary Ability Faizullah excavates and attaches love for her own personal archive to the larger archive of Bangladeshi people whose histories and personal narratives are often obscured and overlooked by the bureaucracy and erasure of migration.
Praise for Tarfia Faizullah
“This collection has propulsion. It has the fire. Faizullah can write her ass off.”
—Tommye Blount, author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue
“Tarfia Faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision.”
―Natasha Trethewey
"This is a poetry of news--where brutality, desire, and beauty combine to form a rich testament of what poetry can do: to sing and disturb us awake, and leave us feeling more alive than ever before. Faizullah's debut collection of poems is simply a triumph--it's pure fire in your hands."
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees
“Faizullah is an essential poet for our times.”
—The Rumpus
“Faizullah’s entire collection—powerful, wide-ranging—is an affirmation, an accomplished second book.”
—The Millions
“This collection glows.”
—Signature Reads
“Intimate and prophetic. . . . A fierce confrontation of grief and belonging.”
—The Riveter
“Faizullah is an immensely empathetic poet, and this visceral, muscle-deep quality penetrates her writing.”
—Anomaly
“Remarkable. . . . Reading Faizullah, one might allude to Adrienne Rich’s poetry and her vision of confronting reality in fresh language. Striking, insightful poems that will move and delight readers. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal, starred review