from Evening Street
by Aya Kanbar
translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel
In 2021, poet Aya Kanbar made her debut at just seventeen with the assured, highly charged collection Hyperverklighet (Hyperreality), published by Nirstedt/Litteratur. Exploring the porous, disorienting interfaces between our digital and material worlds, the collection received widespread acclaim, including nominations for numerous prestigious literary awards.
In her explosive second collection, Aftongata (Evening Street, 2023), Kanbar turns her attention to the teenage years. Structured largely through the interacting perspectives of a ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’, Kanbar offers a heady, romantic and often dark exploration of love, loneliness, destruction and the search for identity. Laced with striking, intimate imagery and references to mythology and pop culture, the sublime and the mundane alike, Evening Street is a rich, deep-felt collection from a poet in her stride.
The poems presented below are taken from the ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’ sections of the collection.
from Evening Street
dusk
kicked clichés
our heliocentric rituals;
peach sky above
melts in your eyes
& lands
in your dreamy tears
the maestro killed us
but we fled
like obstinate teenagers
always do
diminuendo,
quicksilver,
waterfoam
a girl who smokes
& sells her body reluctantly
to illusionists
black magic in her bones,
ash in those few words
azrael is the shadow in front of me
she turns around
hypnotized
& smiles like a loyal friend
before an emerald green bottle
smashes the back of the head
in unconditional real time,
do you promise
you’d bleed for me
in a light pink pontiac
that you stole
from the friend you said
you never knew
paradise
an evening poem
of longing & jade crystal
for what will never
come to pass
my open window
let me predict & film
a spectacle society
i’m at the top of the cast
my eyes are the only cameras in the studio
you smile at me from the linoleum floor
i choose azrael as archangel
& ask her tongue
to stroke my trembling skin
i never believed
i’d be given this—
my name engraved in her
my blood on her teeth
i never understood
how bound you could be
can you explain it,
one last time?
you gave me my purpose in life —
to help & serve,
even if my body resists
you became an iconoclast
promise to wait for me
at the apartment of moonstone
after the class
predestined winners like you
can rest,
you can exhale
that’s a given
444
is it true?
azrael’s hand caresses me
& i whisper her name in yearning
my scattered fragments
combine in your shade
in an interstellar breeze
everything told now
is the memory of pain
the present is gone
everything is gone
a future
you erased
because we borrowed the stars
we played with in wonder,
decaying mareel
in a false vault of sky
we adorned
the universe’s wallpaper
with the wrong ornaments
put things together
that did not belong
constellations without delay
a blind widow
stuck in that cosmic sea
a horse whose corpse
left us stranded
in the labyrinth sky
i was an insufficiently superlative
our love was eclectic
beneath plum-colored clouds
& we praised that originality
crisp
a neon lit night
you part your lips
your throat is weary,
those starchy white teeth
crushed by new kisses
your breath
between every syllable
& every capricious simile
silenced i understood
now you’ve found other voices
nothing//perfection
what i hope now
is that you vanish into the ashes
covered in foul blood plasma
& a joke in my happy mouth
//
i’ve been wanting this a long time,
after my & my friends’ laughter
devoured everything
now i’m cut-glass chandeliers
a cartier
a night in librarytown
cold, expensive champagne
flows from my mouth
in time with the metronome’s clicking
Aftongata
Nirstedt/Litteratur, 2023, 112 pages
Rights: the publisher
We are grateful to Nirstedt/Litteratur and to Aya Kanbar for granting permission to publish this translated extract.
Aya Kanbar made her poetry debut in 2021 with the collection Hyperverklighet, which among others was nominated for Sveriges Radio's Poetry Prize, Borås Tidning's Debutant Prize and The Swedish Writers' Union's Catapult Prize for best debut.
Elizabeth Clark Wessel has translated books by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde, Carolina Setterwall, Kristina Lugn, Linda Segtnan, and many others. A collection of her poetry, None of It Belongs to Me, is forthcoming from Game Over Books in 2024.