National Poetry Month : Saba Pakdel,

 

Waked

 

precarity      Wakes
we are not dead
yet
every morning of a century
lullabies into a terror of as-if or
what-if or
if-only
we were in the Wakes of our present
doomed in the ruins
a reminiscence

an exophonic experience
when the language of disaster
a prolonged pain it is to
translate the bombing of a maternity hospital
for motherless
landless
Waked babies

 

April 2022

 

 

Saba Pakdel is a poet, modernist scholar, and PhD student in the English department at University of Victoria. She completed her BA and MA in English language and literature in Iran. She earned her second MA in English at Simon Fraser University in 2021.

Saba has attended and coordinated literary workshops and poetry readings; published poems, translations, and essays; and collaborated in stage plays as a playwright and backstage filmmaker. For a while, she worked as an editorial assistant at Talonbooks Publishing in Vancouver. Photography is her occasional and non-verbal means of communication with the world.

Saba specializes in migration studies and contemporary literature with a focus on exile, refugee, and immigration problems, particularly in works of migrant authors from the Middle East and Maghreb. Her research addresses the identity formation of migrants away from Euro-centric formulations based in twentieth century ideas about migration, largely derived from post-WWII circumstances, toward a contemporary reckoning with experiences of migration.

A chapbook will be out in May with above/ground press.