OCTOBERS

Some stranger-than-fiction truths are just strange enough for the elaborate patterns and fateful coincidences of poetry. Take it from Sahar Muradi, who structures her debut collection around four climactic episodes, all of which occurred in the month of October: the American-led invasion of Afghanistan, where Muradi lived until the age of three (“The Occupation, 2001”); her father’s death (“The Passing, 2016”); a relationship’s dissolution (“The Separation, 2009”); and her daughter’s birth (“The Birth, 2018”). OCTOBERS has its Octobers both ways: one moment Muradi is immersing herself in the past, rendering a tumultuous month with a memoirist’s specificity; the next she’s stepping outside her story, noticing how each October is mirrored in all the others.

“Zuihitsu for the New Diaspora,” the fractured prose poem that closes “The Occupation, 2001,” starts by recalling early years in the United States:

My memories begin at age nine. Before that, a long, white
     expanse, mute as a rope.

Nothing is quiet about small towns with their hateful lawn
     signs.

Stanzas later, Muradi finds startling metaphors for childbirth in imperial invasions and withdrawals:

Soon, my son, his own twinning: the end of an occupation
     and its harsh exit.

Who will I be once the gates open?

What unites Muradi’s four Octobers is a quest to describe things rightly: “All my life trying to name the thing without naming it.” That quest carries her across languages—English and Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi, but also Bambara, Afrikaans, German—and deep down into etymologies and near-homophones. “Jan / Jahan,” an elegy titled after the Dari words for “dear” and “world,” conducts tragic play in English, too:

he is not here
was here

was just
Here

was just

a bloom
of eyes dark

ening

It’s only when Muradi imagines a future with her daughter that she can come to “the great green field / where at last I can remove the high heel of language,” free from “language / that meats me pulverizes me.” If public language constrains or threatens, poetic language might help her move on. As she avows in a concluding section, “After October”: “the dream is that language is not inert.”