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.