LOW FLYING PLANES: Poems

LOW FLYING PLANES: Poems

Selected by Jake Skeets for the 2025 National Poetry Series, a reverent and revelatory debut examining language, memory, and identity. “You looked at me like there was no / nest in my throat,” Hajjar Baban writes in this spare, striking collection. “Like I knew how / to sing. Like it was okay I had nowhere / to be.” Writing from a mixed Afghan Kurdish heritage, she navigates the truth that exists between memory and erasure. Equal measures grounded and unmoored, the poems in LOW FLYING PLANES search for answers to the impossible question of belonging, catching fragmented glimpses of “the plane intercepting sight of the shooting / star,” “satellites in the night sky,” “the language my father / didn’t invite me to.” Wielding a breakable and cautious syntax, Baban writes with a precision that highlights the complexity of interiority under surveillance and the tension between safety and yearning. Our speaker is hypervigilant and uncommonly observant, seeking to understand what language cannot capture: layered volumes of loss, the unshakable instinct to hide, “a name for how my father looks / at the sky.” Guarded yet resolute, inquisitive yet profoundly wise, LOW FLYING PLANES paints absence into a tangible shape. “If language is to be made whole, if memory, if truth,” Jake Skeets writes of this collection, “it begins with a book like this.” “At its best, poetry shapes, from the voices and experiences of our people, our homelands, and ourselves, an approach to language that is revivifying and radically inventive. The poems of Hajjar Baban’s LOW FLYING PLANES do just that, navigating a landscape and a self composed of shards born of multigenerational displacement and violence. ‘She worries about which life / to birth, which meaning to speak,’ Baban writes, and that engine of worry, in balance with the will to speak, the pulse and ingenuity of her syntax, and the design of the fragments of narrative to which she has sporadic access, are the keys to her superb artistry.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry "Poet Hajjar Baban’s LOW FLYING PLANES haunts with what won’t, can’t, mustn’t be said or understood. Questions left unasked, jokes one oughtn’t tell, Kurdish names vaporized in flanking brackets—these silences compose this startling debut’s anti-lexicon. Baban writes, 'I feel like I’m missing a language, / I would say, if I had a hand in revealing / the risk in my empty name'—it’s emptiness that sends the deepest reverberations and Baban’s unyielding echoes." —Douglas Kearney, author of Sho “ LOW FLYING PLANES underscores that to write poems in English is to deploy one tongue of American military violence. Hajjar Baban evades empire’s surveillant logics by rendering the lyric especially gemlike: translucent, hard-edged, cut into dazzling facets. Refracting the individual and collective losses of Afghans and Kurds, her lines open the given light into unprecedented spectra. Grace breaks forth from this book infused with faith. I go in awe of it.” —Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man "I look to experience the world through the lens of a poem. Not because I long to step into another’s shoes, but because I hope for the light to be slanted when and after I read. I want to leave a book of poems altered in some way. Hajjar Baban’s Low Flying Planes stayed with me for weeks after I finished it, and it all began with the rocks. 'Rocks made in my body / against reason, against beauty,' Baban writes. This collection proves that poems can hold immense beauty, history, and region, and that if language is to be made whole, if tradition is to be made whole, if memory, if truth, it begins with a book like this. I’m eager for the world to enter this one and emerge on the other side transformed, into a place where words are both nourished and at stake. I’m eager for this poet, for a new voice that asks us to change. It is my honor to introduce this marvelous work." —Jake Skeets, author of Horses  and judge for the National Poetry Series Hajjar Baban is a Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet. Her work appears in publications including Prairie Schooner , Guernica , Poetry Daily , and Hayden’s Ferry Review , where she won the 2025 Poetry Contest, selected by Hieu Minh Nguyen. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, Baban is also a cofounder of the Kurdish Poets Collective. LOW FLYING PLANES is her first full-length book of poems.