Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Book Reviews
The rewards and punishments used here to train the horse are symbolic
of the case Hasan makes throughout the collection that the world
indoctrinates us in the same way. “Shia” is most often used to refer to
the second largest denomination in Islam, but at its heart “shia” refers
to “follower” or “partisan”; and in Grieving Shias, Hasan often defines
people by what they believe and with whom they would stand or fall,
as these lines at the end of “Mourning and Other Activities” indicate:
You mourn and cry your heart out in the heat.
Those of us who have faith
then crawl under the belly of the horse
whenever it comes to a stop.
Between the four brown hooves
take refuge from the sun.
In perhaps the collection’s most ambitious poem, “In That Part of
the World,” Hasan writes poignantly of war-torn Afghanistan, where
“The sky here is American like the blue of your eyes”; but Hasan
never forgets the history and its consequences upon the land and its
people, “...parched soil... / on which the primal play of progress comes
to pass.” The nine sections of the poem explore the past and present
through Noor Mohammad Taraki, the Bamiyan Buddhas, cluster
bombs, and child martyrs. Hasan’s words are those of the “uncertain
exile” who:
...has nothing to do
with the divine or with any other kind of comedy,
but with what has remained or with what reminds:
with the trace of terror that persists.
So it is fitting—and powerfully disconcerting—when the final section
of “In That Part of the World” leaves us with this image:
If only Gandhi’s spinning wheel had spun
a million yards of cloth
we would have covered all our war dead.
And as for tents, we would have built
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