A poet’s thoughts on Belonging, Silence and the Spaces in between: Aria Aber’s Hard Damage and Good Girl. 

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Few poets write today with her precision, power and quiet fury

In the shifting terrain of contemporary poetry, Aria Aber, a Berlin based poet whose work has garnered international acclaim has carved out a voice that is as unflinching as it is lyrical, forged in exile, shaped by memory, and sharpened by history. Aria Aber writes in the language of lost homes. Her poetry speaks from the precipice- where geography collapses, language falters, and memory becomes both a ghost and a guide. Across her work, she explores exile not as a one-time rupture but as a lifelong echo. For readers attuned to questions of identity, history, and belonging, Aber’s poems are less a destination and more a terrain – devastated, luminous, and utterly alive.

Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage (2019), announced her as one of the most vital voices in contemporary poetry. Winner of the 2020 PEN America literary Award in Poetry, the book marked an immediate and astonishing arrival. It is merely not a collection of poems – it is a geography of loss. It is a daughter’s hymn, a refugee’s archive, and a linguist’s rebellion. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, Aber’s work speaks of identity and inheritance. Her work does not flinch; it stares directly into the void of displacement and dares to write beauty there. 

In its pages Aber navigates the dissonance of being born to Afghan parents in Germany- of growing up in a Western nation while carrying an ancestral country scarred by war and political loss. The Afghanistan Aber evokes is not one reclaimed through nostalgia or romanticism but one rendered through archival imagination and pain.

“The German word for home is Heimat,” she writes, “but what is the word for a place that no longer exists?” This question lingers through every page of Hard Damage, turning into an elegy for all that exile erases- not only lands and languages, but versions of the self that never had the chance to exist.

Hard damage is not just a debut-it is an eruption. A work of art that burns through layers of history, religion, and exile with formal mastery and moral force. In poem after poem, Aber weaves together threads of personal and collective memory-her family’s flight from Afghanistan, the ache of immigrant adolescence, the spiritual vertigo of multilingualism, with a grace that is simultaneously classical and utterly contemporary. But that is what sets Aber apart from other writers-the ability to smuggle music into grief. 

And yet for all its gravity, Hard Damage is not a book of despair. It is a book of survival- not triumphant but raw and exacting. The poems are quiet in tone but thunderous in implication. In “Reading Rilke like Kabul,” Aber writes:

“I wanted poetry to be the opposite of war/ a mother’s voice is louder than a siren”

This-this is the thesis of the book. Not that poetry escapes war but out-sings it. At a time when borders are hardened, and identities are politicized, Aber gives us a third space- the poem. A home not built of stone or passport but of syllable and breath.

Aria Aber writes with the soul of someone who remembers the rest of us. And in doing so, she asks the most human question of all: What does it mean to belong when everything you come from has been taken, renamed, or buried?

There may be no answer. But there is this book. And that too, is a home.

In 2024, Aber returned with Good Girl, a book that deepens her landscape. If Hard Damage was an excavation, then Good Girl is a reckoning- a conversation between past and present, faith and doubt, inheritance, and self-invention. With poems that span Berlin, Kabul and Brooklyn, and unnamed places of internal exile, Aber brings to life the contradictions of a woman navigating post-colonial identity in a world that insists on binaries.

Good Girl is not about goodness in a moral sense; it is about the performance of virtue in a world structured by surveillance. The title is a provocation and a paradox. Who gets to be the good girl? The obedient daughter, the assimilated immigrant, the silent witness? Aber dismantles these roles with lyrical bravado and rigor.

Aber’s formal experimentation in Good Girl is bolder, more unshackled. She plays with fragmentation, spacing and the musicality of enjambment to mirror the fractured, polyphonic nature of life. 

Reading Aria Aber is to be reminded of what poetry can do at its highest calling; not merely reflect the world but refract it- bend its truths into prisms we had not imagined. Her poems ask questions: What do we inherit, and what do we resist? How do we mourn things that never existed? And the things were never allowed to name? Can language ever truly hold a homeland?

In the cadences of Hard Damage and Good Girl, Aber proves that the most stunning language often comes from those who have had to learn silence first. Aber offers readers a different kind of literary companionship, one that does not look away from loss but walks alongside it with grace and fire, carrying us across distances we didn’t know we could cross, to a path that knows where we’ve been.