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.”