[11/13/25] Anjuman, Nadia / Arterian & Omar (trs.): Smoke Drifts

World Poetry, paperback

Publication Date: November 13, 2025

Publisher Marketing: Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005) drew on the lineage of Persian and Sufi writing and her life under Taliban rule, attending to love, oppression, myth, and devotion through lyrics that both embrace and resist tradition. Anjuman grew up in the Herat, Afghanistan, a city known for centuries for its poetry. While the Taliban was in power, Anjuman met with other women in what appeared to be a needlepoint school, one of the few sanctioned pastimes for women, to secretly discuss literature and poetry. After the fall of the Taliban, Anjuman was finally able to attend university. She wrote and published a celebrated volume of poetry and was set to publish another before her early death due to domestic violence. Selections from both of Anjuman’s collections are presented here for the first time in English.

“Nadia Anjuman’s poetry in Diana Arterian and Marina Omar's masterful translation is a testament to the liberating power of poetry and translation to inspire hope and resilience in the face of adversity and injustice.” —FATEMEH SHAMS

“Anjuman’s biography is so iconic, so tragic, that it tends to distract us from the depth and brilliance of her work. Here is a poet who had mastered Persian’s classical and modern poetics, its forms, imagery, tropes, rhythms, and historical resonances. In these ghazals and free verse poems we find the patient stone, the caged bird, the green garden of hope blighted, the desire for a Beloved denied, all reworked in the context of twenty-first century Afghanistan. With passion, irony, and anger she distills that literary heritage, and the beauty and constraints of her life, into poems of ferocious and devastating precision. A voice with power to be reckoned with, and thus silenced in her time.” —ELIZABETH T. GRAY, JR.

“Nadia Anjuman, an impassioned ‘daughter to the city of elegy and ghazals,’ met an unimaginable end that threatened to silence her words before they could ‘fill the chest of history with gold.’ Now Diana Arterian and Marina Omar bring those words as a gift for us in English. Her poetry speaks of ‘bitter stories’ that ‘have made homes of our hearts,’ women who have ‘joined the children of iron,’ and a nation where ‘no caravan arrived from the land of friendship.’ Yet even in despair, she never lost hope, imagining a future where the ‘mind’s tree is no longer devastated by autumn’ and her ‘soul will climb to the center of God’s light.’ As her name conveys, Nadia was—no, is—the enduring hope and the songstress of her people. —KAVEH BASSIRI