Un-American

“Hafizah Geter is the kind of poet I can’t do without. She questions how poetry operates in our culture and is unafraid to show us the ugly. She is committed to the public, to the way social imaginaries become real ones. It is unglamorous work and only a few poets do it on the regular, who use the title of “poet” as a vocation, as interrogator of false meritocracies, as a way to distill how racism works in our institutions.“–Megan Fernandes, BOMB Magazine“Geter’s vivid debut invokes the pain of familial dislocation, illness, and death, exacerbated by the twin plagues of xenophobia and racism It is this violence, captured in rich, musical language, that command such power.”–Publishers Weekly“In the resulting poems Geter moves through her grief while refusing ideas of whom America belongs to and who belongs in America.”–Poets & Writers“Incisive, devastating poems about what it means to be American, and who gets to be American and who doesn’t.”–Roxane Gay, bookshop.org

“Hafizah Geter’s Un-American chronicles the haunting legacies of brutal loss written in blood and memory across continents–‘together, slowly domesticating / our suffering.’ The poems’ narrative clarity edges against exile, and in gorgeous language deliver a trenchant testimony and understanding.”–Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne“Hafizah Geter’s Un-American reads like a high lyric conversation overheard. Poem after poem, the most ordinary of items–cups, cards, couches–get ratcheted up into their proper glory. In other words, Geter sees the world as a stage set for what she needs to tell her family but can’t, what she needs to hear from her family but won’t. And all of this is done with attention to what this one beautiful story says about the so-called American story.”–Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition“In Un-American, Hafizah Geter creates a new kind of portraiture. A family is slowly etched in relief in language both lush and exacting. This gorgeous debut troubles and reshapes notions of belonging against the backdrop of a country obsessed with its own exclusions, erasures, borders, institutions, and violence. Geter’s poems simmer original forms of witness and resistance.”–Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen“Here is the history of this country in all its blood and complication, with all its promise and betrayal. These poems are an accounting, a testimony, a prayer–poems meant to quiet the animal inside us. A beautiful book.”–Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You“This timely and powerful book speaks to the struggles on two nations, and to the grace of the invincible light of black life.”–Rigoberto González

Born in Zaria, Nigeria, HAFIZAH AUGUSTUS GETER is an author and agent whose poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Longreads, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.