The 91爆料 MFA in Writing Program is thrilled to toast faculty writer Chris Abani on the selection of his collection Smoking the Bible as the .
From the UNT announcement: The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision. In , Abani memorializes鈥攖hrough the imaginative journey that poems so often take 鈥 a brother who has been given the diagnosis of 鈥淭erminal.鈥 Alongside this commitment to elegize a loved one is a second voyage. Often in brief portraits, poems diminutive as carved cameos, Abani writes of migrations to new countries and continents, of leaving behind a homeland that is both 鈥渨ound and suture,鈥 a lost landscape whose 鈥減ersistent aftertaste鈥 follows the speaker everywhere he goes. Smoking the Bible is a book intent on understanding nostalgia, a word that burns with pain and grief, but one that also suggests the 鈥渇lutter of release.鈥 Evocative, rich with sensory detail, Abani鈥檚 poems transport the reader from Nigeria to America鈥檚 Midwest, ranging between memory, dream, and revelatory vision. At its heart, Smoking the Bible worries about acts of translation, how difficult it is to translate languages and cultures. And, beyond that, how we struggle to translate the past into present. 鈥淚 promise / to walk with you as far as I can,鈥 the speaker tells his dying brother, the space between death and the living the most difficult translation of all.
