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Exiles of Eden looks at the origin story of Adam, Eve, and their exile from the Garden of Eden, exploring displacement and alienation from its mythological origins to the present. In this formally experimental collection steeped in Somali narrative tradition, Osman gives voice to the experiences and traumas of displaced people over multiple generations. The characters in these poems encounter exile's strangeness while processing the profoundly isolating experience of knowing that that once you are sent out of Eden, you can't go back.
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Reviews
"Ladan Osman has an abundance of talent, and she is one of kind. There is informed wisdom to her poetry, which, on top of being moving, inspires the reader with positive thinking. A wonderful collection."
Nuruddin Farah
"Ladan Osman is a poet of wonder and inquiry. Her wonder is muscular and thorough, and requires an inventory of the known, a charting of what is lost, and the incantation of desire. In her second full-length collection, Exiles of Eden, even the presumed paradisal qualities of the garden before the fall are called into question. The marriage, the homelands, the underworlds that exile Osman's speake
Donika Kelly
"Ladan Osman is one of the most alive minds in poetry today. Under her supreme gaze, the ordinary is allowed safe passage into strangeness and the surreal is domesticated without losing its innate chaos. Whether with the pen or with the lens, everything is lifted to a higher, fantastic dimension in the frame of Osman's looking. Exiles of Eden scares me. It's that good. I didn't know you could do w
Danez Smith