“Come,” Rasma Haidri invites the reader in this stunning collection, “you who will unearth my archeology.” Then, with striking and evocative imagery, she leads us through the depths, poem by remarkable poem. Haidri examines family, love, culture, marriage, motherhood, place, and loss with fierce attention, suffused by a passion for truth, and informed by hard-won experience. Her voice is utterly unique, European in its irony and obliquely rendered wisdom, American in its openness and heart. There is difficulty and darkness in these poems, but there is also delight, for this is a deliciously sensual book, one informed by wonder, where “summer sieves through a screen,” and the writer searches for “any bit of beauty…/ that makes me stop and turn my head.” There is reinvention, too, the lesson that we can “turn off the camera, walk away / [and] reappear in new scenes, clicking our heels and starting over.” Always we are in the presence of an almost preternaturally alert poetic intelligence, one who is generous, tender, wise, and constantly filtering the world through the sensitive register of her consciousness to report back what she sees. “My hands reach for the shimmer,” she says in one poem. Reading this book, we reach with her and are rewarded time and time again. The story of a soul in the making, As If Anything Can Happen reminds me why I read poetry – to remember what it means to be human, and to celebrate what it means to be alive on this earth.
~ Alison Townsend, Pushcart Prize winning author of The Blue Dress and Persephone in America, selected for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Award
This collection’s title perfectly captures the paradoxical ambiguity of these alternately wry and tender lyric poems, whose characters seem to fear and hope in equal measure, hinting at a salving sense of irony which finds humor in humanity, even amidst the emotion of sudden traumatic loss: “this stranger in my mother’s/body, wearing what my mother never wore, and certainly never / would be caught dead in.” Rasma Haidri explores a fraught family history with an inspiring combination of compassion, grace, and gratitude.
~ April Ossmann, winner of a Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice and Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant Awards, and author of Event Boundaries and Anxious Music
Rasma Haidri’s poems beckon the reader in with their shared human subject-matter and warmth, yet have an edge of strangeness that makes them more complex and questioning than they might at first seem. Reading As if Anything Can Happen is an unusual and rewarding experience.
~ Susan Wicks, author of The Months and The Clever Daughter, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Best Collection Prizes, and winner of the Scott Moncrieff and Oxford-Weidenfield Translation Prizes
Rasma Haidri grew up in Tennessee and makes her home on the arctic seacoast of Norway. Her poems and essays appear widely in anthologies, literary journals, and college textbooks in the USA and abroad. Literary distinctions for her writing include the Southern Women Writers Association Emerging Writer Award in creative non-fiction, the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters & Science poetry award, the Easy Street Great American Sentence prize, and a Best of the Net nomination. Read more of her work at www.rasma.org
