Nadia Anjuman - Smoke Drifts

Forthcoming

May 23

Written By Andrew Bourne

Nadia Anjuman
Smoke Drifts: Selected Poems

Translated from Persian by
DIANA ARTERIAN and MARINA OMAR

Bilingual Edition
November 6, 2025

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Born in Herat, Afghanistan, NADIA ANJUMAN (1980-2005) surreptitiously gathered with women in the Golden Needle School to discuss literature under the guise of practicing needlepoint—one of the few Taliban-approved pastimes for women. After Afghanistan’s liberation from the Taliban, Anjuman attended Herat University and published Gul-e-Dodi (Flower of Smoke). She died in 2005 after being severely beaten by her husband. Her second volume of poetry, Yek Sàbad Délhoreh (A Basket of Doubt), was published the following year. Flower of Smoke has been reprinted three times and sold over three thousand copies with readers in Iran, Pakistan, France, and beyond. Her poetry has since been translated and published in Italian and Portuguese.

DIANA ARTERIAN holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and is the author of the poetry collections Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press) and Playing Monster :: Seiche (1913 Press), which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Her work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Caldera, Millay Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press, she writes “The Annotated Nightstand” column at LitHub and lives in Los Angeles.

MARINA OMAR moved to the US from Afghanistan in 2001 and received her PhD from the University of Virginia in Political Science in 2016. Marina has published an article on Afghan constitution selection in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Her research has been supported by multiple fellowships and grants, including The Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, The Robert J. Huskey Travel Fellowship, and Quandt International Research Fund. She has taught at the University of Virginia, Mary Washington University, and Mary Baldwin University.

ARIA ABER grew up in Germany, where she was born to Afghan refugees. Her poetry collection Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a Whiting Award. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her first novel, Good Girl, was recently published by Hogarth. She is a contributing editor at The Yale Review, and an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont.

Nadia Anjuman
Smoke Drifts: Selected Poems

Translated from Persian by
DIANA ARTERIAN and MARINA OMAR

Introduction by
ARIA ABER

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.

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