-Rupture Anthem is a journey of severance, faith, and womanhood across three continents. An intricate, dazzling record of a Muslim girl’s becoming bracketed by the oil boom in the Arabian Gulf, the migrant abuse under the region’s restrictive kafala system that built its shining new cities; the flowering of erotic desire against the backdrop of strict religious mores. The speaker of this stunning book journeys across countries, cultures, and languages in search of belonging and freedom. Against America’s War on Terror, its ghostly afterlives, she navigates urban militarism and patriarchy, exploring what it means to be lost among your own people before ending up in the United States where she discovers freedom is often an unkept promise. Through lyric and documentary poems that braid memory with history and feminist dignity, Rupture Anthem architects transformative acts of witness, dissent, bodily pleasure against the systemic forces that silence.
PRAISE
"Rupture Anthem arrives fully formed and fully armed. Hera Naguib’s debut is lush, borderless, making an utterly original cartography out of expulsion and ‘sudden unbelonging’—poems that know exactly where they stand even when the ground gives way. These are love poems as much as they are poems of displacement: richly sensual, stubbornly alive, insisting that transformation is found in the breaking open."
- Tishani Doshi, author of Egrets, While War and Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
"In novelistic narrative distilled to brilliant and heady lyric, Hera Naguib writes of a Pakistani family in Saudi Arabia—the hope and longing in such migration—and the trauma of sudden displacement by plainclothes police. Though Rupture Anthem leaps between Jeddah and Lahore, this is a story of many people in too many geographies. I had never read such a book—complex in each movement, sincere with lyric ingenuity—that made my own past and present so visible to myself, because I hadn’t yet read this book. I didn’t know there was a place in English in the United States for such experience, what I’d thought was untranslatable. Who can make another feel so deeply and personally understood, but the poet? This is a debut of the deepest offering: poetry of testimony, poetry of love-call, laded and living."
- Sasha Pimentel, author of For Want of Water and Insides She Swallowed
PRAISE
"Rupture Anthem arrives fully formed and fully armed. Hera Naguib’s debut is lush, borderless, making an utterly original cartography out of expulsion and ‘sudden unbelonging’—poems that know exactly where they stand even when the ground gives way. These are love poems as much as they are poems of displacement: richly sensual, stubbornly alive, insisting that transformation is found in the breaking open."
- Tishani Doshi, author of Egrets, While War and Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
"In novelistic narrative distilled to brilliant and heady lyric, Hera Naguib writes of a Pakistani family in Saudi Arabia—the hope and longing in such migration—and the trauma of sudden displacement by plainclothes police. Though Rupture Anthem leaps between Jeddah and Lahore, this is a story of many people in too many geographies. I had never read such a book—complex in each movement, sincere with lyric ingenuity—that made my own past and present so visible to myself, because I hadn’t yet read this book. I didn’t know there was a place in English in the United States for such experience, what I’d thought was untranslatable. Who can make another feel so deeply and personally understood, but the poet? This is a debut of the deepest offering: poetry of testimony, poetry of love-call, laded and living."
- Sasha Pimentel, author of For Want of Water and Insides She Swallowed