Aria Aber
“My late mentor Louise Glück always said to me that the quality she most looks for in writing is the feeling of the language ‘being alive’. I have never forgotten it. I think there are many ways to interpret it aesthetically and philosophically, but mostly, I think of ‘aliveness’ as a real heart that throbs underneath the writing, be it a poem, a piece of non-fiction, or a novel.”
“[An] exhilarating debut novel . . . Aber has published astonishing poems I’ve read dozens of times. It’s thrilling to see her turn major poetic gifts toward the sweep of this Künstlerroman.”
“Open Good Girl to any page and you’ll be immediately arrested by the haunting beauty of her work and the way desire pushes against the seams of despair.”
“[An] impressive debut . . . Aber writes with the masterful precision of an archivist.”
“Aber is not afraid of erudition or the hard labor of crafting poems that peel open in layers; at times, reading her work reminded me of poets who have worked across similarly broad linguistic topographies: Carolyn Forché, Frank Bidart, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and others. But Aber’s work here is hardly derivative of those masters. She is her own poet, her own voice, and her debut is my favorite volume of poetry this year.”
“Aria Aber’s stunning debut is both deeply personal and deeply historical. Examining the effects of western colonialism on Afghanistan and the consequences of decisions dating back to the 1950s, Hard Damage questions and mourns the idea of citizenship. This collection focuses on stories of displacement, which Aber accomplishes by breaking boundaries, breaking forms, and even breaking language.”
“Hard Damage, in both its masterful depictions of complicity and its unwavering focus on what is true, asks us to consider what we owe each other as people occupying this same, dying, earth.”
Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her most recent book is the novel Good Girl (Hogarth/Bloomsbury UK, 2025), a finalist for the Women’s Prize. It has appeared in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Japanese, and Turkish editions. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere.
In an interview with the Women’s Prize, she asked how poetry informed her prose while writing Good Girl. She responded: “To be honest, I had to activate a completely different part of my brain to write this novel, because I was intent on writing a story with at least a little bit of a plot, with a narrative, and a moment of change both for Nila and the other characters around her. In this book, the larger story of Nila’s journey is as important as the smaller, more concentrated element of the image. And yet, on a more granular basis, the language, including so many of the imagistic descriptions… are a testament to my training as a poet. I’m always thinking of a particular craft element Eduardo C. Corral once discussed in an interview about his poetry: that he unlocked the real potential for the lyric once he moved away from fact and towards the music of the line. On a sentence level, I am always guided by the music; I think of sound first, while logic becomes more important during the revision stage.”
She serves as the poetry editor of Kismet, as a contributing editor at The Yale Review, and works as an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont. Aber divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.
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Book Jacket
Book Jacket
