In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight the life and work of poet, Tarfia Faizullah. She is the author of two poetry collections, REGISTERS OF ILLUMINATED VILLAGES (Graywolf, 2018) and SEAM (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Tarfia’s writing is translated into Bengali, Persian, Chinese, and Tamil, and is part of the theater production Birangona: Women of War. Tarfia’s collaborations include photographers, producers, composers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists, resulting in several interdisciplinary projects, including an EP, Eat More Mango. Source
This episode includes a reading of her poem, “Self-Portrait as Slinky”, featured in our 2022 Get Lit Anthology.
“Self-Portrait as Slinky”
It’s true I wanted
to be beautiful before
authentic. Say the word
exotic. Say minority—
a coiled, dark curl
a finger might wrap
itself in—the long
staircase, and I was
the momentum
of metal springs
descending down
and down,
a tension
—the long staircase,
and I was a stacked series
of spheres finger-tipped
again into motion—say
taut, like a child
who must please
the elders and doesn’t
know how, a curl pulled
thin. I wanted to be
a reckoning, to tornado
into each day’s hard
hands, that wanton
lurching forward
in the dark, another
soaked black ringlet,
that sudden halting