A Journey of Severance, Faith, and Womanhood Across Continents and Cultures

Rupture Anthem is a journey of severance, faith, and womanhood across continents. It follows an intricate, dazzling record of a Muslim girl’s becoming bracketed by the oil boom in the Arabian Gulf, the migrant abuse under the region’s restrictive kafala system that built its shining new cities, and the flowering of erotic desire against the backdrop of strict religious mores. The speaker of this stunning book journeys across countries, cultures, and languages in search of belonging and freedom. Against America’s War on Terror, its ghostly afterlives in her country, she navigates urban militarism and patriarchy, exploring what it means to be lost among your own people before ending up in the United States, where she discovers freedom is often an unkept promise. Through lyric and documentary poems that braid memory with history and feminist dignity, Rupture Anthem architects transformative acts of witness, dissent, and bodily pleasure against the systemic forces that silence.

Born to Pakistani parents in Saudi Arabia, Hera Naguib is a writer and an educator. Hera holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University, with a focus on global and transnational poetry and an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. Hera’s work has received support from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Art Omi, VIDA, and Vermont Studio Center. Winner of the John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award and the Quarterly West Poetry Prize. Hera’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Poetry International, Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, New England Review, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Wasafiri, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She lives in Boston, MA.