Grief Theory by Bahar Orang

From the acclaimed author of Where Things Touch comes a rigorous interrogation of grief as an intimate register of loss, and political transformation.

In Bahar Orang’s formally innovative collection, grief emerges as neither innocent nor private but as structured by war, empire, and diaspora. As intimate relations are continually traversed through geopolitical realities, the poet-speaker sifts through the debris of language alongside the likes of Fanon, Gramsci, and Césaire.

Moving between lyric fragments and essayistic meditations, the book deftly brings personal loss into relation with longer histories of colonial and imperial violence. In doing so, it poses difficult but necessary questions about the cruelty that can exist within empathy, the pleasure of righteous outrage, the fantasy of proximity to suffering, and the ways in which love and care themselves may reproduce domination.

This unique hybrid work resists linear narrative and reveals grief as an ongoing, unresolved condition. Ultimately, Grief Theory asks what it means to witness, desire, and remain implicated in the violent world we seek to endure and to understand.

Praise for Grief Theory

“Grief Theory is not an address to a reader but a calibration of poetry as a tactic… Poetically, Orang calculates the residues of estrangement, the limits of freedom, the madness of militancy. From inside the pulsing pit of empire, each entry prods at the banal to reveal the defiled constituents of our emotional lives: vengefulness, shame, grief, disgust, repulsion. Not desire, but need. Don’t refuse the demands these poems make; touch them, ‘as if everything is at stake.’” —Jody Chan, author of Madness Belongs to the People