Anna Badkhen was born in the Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. She is the author of six previous books of nonfiction. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and a Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones.
“[I] swiftly fell for the roaming logic of Badkhen’s essays, which
unspool themes of communion and human migration, often while the
author herself is on the road, in Ethiopia or Oklahoma or Chihuahua
City. . . . I was persistently buoyed by the tenderness she brings
to the world and its inhabitants.” —Erica Berry, The Rumpus
"Badkhen has spent her career documenting inequities around the
world.... In her acrobatic seventh collection, longlisted for the
National Book Award, she lasers her attention on the global turmoil
that has expelled one in seven people from their homelands....What
grounds us in this daring work is Badkhen’s incandescent poetics,
an augury all its own." —Stephanie Elizondo Griest, The New
York Times Book Review
"[Badkhen] lasers her attention on the global turmoil that has
expelled one in seven people from their homelands. From the Sahara
to the Texas-Mexico border, with flashbacks to her native Soviet
Union, Badkhen vaults in and out of events ranging from prehistoric
times to the pandemic. . . . What grounds us in this daring work is
Badkhen’s incandescent poetics, an augury all its own." —Stephanie
Elizondo Griest, The New York Times Book Review
"We follow along as she leaves behind a trail of precise,
glistening prose, and each time we arrive somewhere else we
consider, once again, humanity’s shifting, unstable, and essential
relationship with place. We have planted flags and drawn maps, but
— as Badkhen brilliantly demonstrates — the intersecting challenges
of the 21st century (climate, economic, epidemic) might force us to
reconsider our conclusions." —Tope Folarin, Vulture
“Badkhen balances on the precipice of fear and hope, reading the
wisdom found in the shifting sands of the Sahara and in the
graceful dances of birds.” —Jori Lewis, Orion
“It’s a book of truths.” —Leila Fadel, NPR
“[A] brainy, poetic, global essay collection that feels exactly
right for this moment.” —Melissa Febos, Bookforum
"Badkhen urges us to be unflinching in our own gaze, circumscribing
both “the unfathomable wickedness of man” as well as “the
benediction of being human.” . . . Beholding the violence on its
own terms, Badkhen nevertheless marvels in moments of exquisite
perception, holding beauty alongside grief, discerning patterns of
bright benediction that stipple the dark." —Daniel Simon,
World Literature Today
"Via a series of ethereal scholarly essays, the author aims to find
a better way to see and understand grief, especially as embodied in
the world’s migrant crisis. Badkhen recounts her travels around the
globe and bolsters her experiences with a dizzying wealth of
literary and artistic touchstones. Hazily poetic, she constructs
her essays like a collagist, in search of the untapped resonance
that can be channeled when seemingly incongruous ideas are placed
in proximity. . . . A soulful, ambitious quest for a path through
centuries of loss and displacement." —Kirkus Reviews
"What a book! It’s legendary like the legend on a map that explains
things before you go walking through a desert. It’s lost and found,
vulnerable, knowledgeable, invited though possibly in danger or
trapped, plunging through millennia, to consider if a bone may also
be a flute, informing me, incidentally, that the pronghorns on the
ranch land where I walk my dog are related to giraffes. These are
not light-hearted essays, but ones regularly astonished by what the
world holds, at once." —Eileen Myles
“Anna Badkhen is a stunning and sensitive chronicler of our
collective condition. She has a rare gift, a writer whose work is
both urgent and probing, and always beautiful.” —Imani Perry
“A truly global thinker of rare and beautiful gifts, Anna Badkhen
takes us on a journey to the interior of the lyric moment: that
space where understanding flashes at us, and we realize we are at
home on this planet; despite all our maladies, despite our ‘moral
dislocation,’ we still have as our home ‘a memory of our presence,
a memory of our absence.’ The path there, perhaps, is the music of
Badkhen’s prose, as the mind turns and then stops in the middle of
the page, to wonder, to dream, to exhale. This is a beautiful
book.” —Ilya Kaminsky
Ask a Question About this Product More... |