Ordinary Heaven

For Ladan Osman, poetry is a vehicle that allows her to find that which is heavenly, Spiritually alive, and illuminating int eh ordinary details of life; marriage, divorce, domestic work, dancing.  Osman’s poems in Ordinary Heaven interrogate, sometimes quite literally. Her questions are not rhetorical, they  are urgent, often desperate, and the reader shares the poet’s delight and relief when some answers become available through the quest or poetic beauty. Osman is among a handful of emerging poets in the United States who seem poised to reinvigorate the form through candor and craft. Living in America, her engagement with the shifting cultural landscape of poetry is wholly aware of worlds outside.

—-Kwame Dawes