Wounded Vita Nuda - by Maral Taheri (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Mo Habib Translation Prize for Persian Literature, Maral Taheri's poems in Wounded Vita Nuda interrogate the contemporary women's experience in Afghanistan with a violent intimacy.

Due to gendered and religious censorship, the poems in Wounded Vita Nuda were deemed unpublishable in the Persian-speaking countries of Afghanistan and Iran. Appearing in English and Persian, they are now collected into one body of work for the first time. The poems recreate lost blog posts and draw from journal entries spanning Maral Taheri's life--from her work as a women's rights activist in Afghanistan and Iran, to her migration to Paris in pursuit of political asylum. Maral Taheri's voice is at once hallucinatory, apocryphal, and defiantly feminine. Her work seeps with sweat and blood as her verses take on the form of a body contending with religion, sex, and violence. Each poem announces itself, building towards an all-encompassing crescendo that will continue to peal in the ears of readers after the last page.

About the Author

Maral Taheri is an Afghan poet born in exile in Iran. Alongside her writing, she has been actively involved in independent women's rights movements in Iran and Afghanistan. She is currently based in France, where she continues her life in diaspora, pursuing her studies in French literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.

Hajar Hussaini is the author of Disbound: Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2022) and the recipient of a 2026 Whiting Award in Poetry. Her translations from Persian include Wounded Vita Nuda: Poems  by Maral Taheri (Deep Vellum, 2027), which won the 2024 Mo Habib Translation Prize and Death and His Brother: A Novel by Khosraw Mani (Syracuse University Press, 2027), which won a 2025 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She has received fellowships from MacDowell and Baldwin for the Arts. Hussaini also co-curates the Salon Salvage reading series in Troy, NY, and is an assistant teaching professor of English at Skidmore College.