Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony

Ladan Osman's work has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Artful Dodge, Narrative Magazine, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and Vinyl Poetry. Her chapbook, Ordinary Heaven, appears in Seven New Generation African Poets: A Chapbook boxed set. She lives in Chicago.

"In a world that too often plugs its ears to voices it thinks unworthy, Osman shows that it's actually more inappropriate to be decorous."-Kathleen Rooney, Chicago Tribune "Ladan Osman conveys a language and logic that is disturbingly fresh; it leaps from one observation to another and speaks familiarly yet obliquely enough to make us listen a little harder."-Wesley Rothman, Rain Taxi "I have rarely encountered a young poet whose work was so completely its own thing, was so little influenced by what trend might be elbowing itself forward on the writing campuses. Osman is a worldly and acutely sensitive writer who knows how to reach right through the sequined veil of fashion and put her hand squarely on the reader's heart, with frank and candid expression, with unaffected wonder."—from Ted Kooser's preface to Ladan Osman's chapbook, Ordinary Heaven "[Ladan Osman] writes out of a passion for language, out of a compelling pleasure and challenge in the potential of the voice to humanize us, or perhaps even better, to affirm our humanity. Osman is a warrior poet, and she is dangerous because she is especially gifted and disciplined about her craft, her technical facility with the poem. This collection offers numerous examples of this skillfulness."—from the foreword by Kwame Dawes “True visionary poets are very rare. Ladan Osman is one. What she sees is extraordinary, and needful.”-Brigit Pegeen Kelly, author of Song and The Orchard

• Foreword by Kwame Dawes    Acknowledgments    SilhouetteIOrdinary Heaven    Words We Lost in the Water    Unsolicited Witness    To Abel    Sugar    Section 8    The Key    First Red Dress    Admonitions    Twigs    Verse of Hairs    My Father Drops His Larynx    Denotation    Connotation    Parable of the Leaf    How to Make a Shadow    IIIntangible Quality    Women Brewing    Diviner of Teacups    The Kitchen-Dweller Presents Evidence    Trouble    Her House Is the Middle East    That Which Scatters and Breaks Apart    Invocation    The Kitchen-Dweller’s Interlude    The Kitchen-Dweller Testifies    Desertion    The Offended Tongue    When the Fire Is Not Enough    Clearing the Land    Situations Wanted    The Figures    Convoluted Mattress    Water    For the Woman Whose Love Is a Bird of Passage    The Man Who Puts Dirt on His Head    IIIThe Glass Images    To the Angel of Accounts on a Holy Night    Tonight    Visitant    The Pilgrims    Woman, Ego, Shadow    The Woman in the Field    Gnats    Apparition One, Apparition Two    Amber Doll    Ken    Hotel Party    Princess Di in an Afterlife    My Brother Receives His Kingdom under a Tree    Proud Flesh    The Albatross Holds a Note in Her Bill    The Trumpet Testifies    Following the Horn’s Call    The Beetle    A Dove Sings for Young Lovers    Western Gate