Ladan Osman poetry collection “Exiles of Eden” out on May 7.

Ladan Osman’s poetry collection Exiles of Eden is set to be unveiled on May 7, 2019.

Poet and essayist Ladan Osman first came to the attention of the poetry community when she won the Sillerman First Book Prize in 2013. She would produce the chapbook Ordinary Heaven, which appeared in the box-set Seven New Generation African Poets (Slapering Hol Press) in the following year. Her full length collection The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (University of Nebraska Press) would follow in 2015.

Since then she has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and the Michener Center.

Her newest collection, Exiles of Eden, a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text, published by Coffee House Press is set to make its appearance in our lives on May 7. Here is the blurb;

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.