• Bushra Rehman

    Bushra Rehman grew up in Corona, Queens but her mother says she was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her father is not so sure, but it would explain a few things.

Marianna’s Beauty Salon AVAILABLE NOW!

“In Marianna’s Beauty Salon, a daughter-witness records the lifelong trades and private tolls of immigration: promise passed down to children who sing the songs of the new land, learning the charm and violence of strange streets. These poems travel memory’s vast landscapes and never quite get over love’s ability to simultaneously wound and sustain us. … Rehman’s poems are about home—the ones we inherit, flee. The homes we lose and still carry, and the homes we become for each other.” — Kamilah Aisha Moon, author of Starshine & Clay and She Has a Name

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Writing

COMPLICATING NARRATIVES: A CONVERSATION WITH BUSHRA REHMAN

THE RUMPUS By Tamiko Byer October 31st, 2018 Poet, novelist, and teaching artist Bushra Rehman knows a Queens bully when she sees one. In her first novel, Corona, and now in her new poetry collection, Marianna’s Beauty Salon, Rehman depicts a tough and tender New York City. Her writing is rooted in her experience of […]

THE NEWEST WAVE OF ASIAN-AMERICAN WRITERS YOU SHOULD KNOW

Literary Hub By Tamiko Byer October 5, 2018 Bushra Rehman  “Writing from life can be a tricky business,” notes Rehman. It’s an art that Rehman has deftly honed in both her poetry and fiction, and which she teaches in her long-running “Two Truths and a Lie” course. Rehman’s novel, Corona, and her recent poetry collection, […]

MARIANNA’S BEAUTY SALON: REVIEW

Publisher’s Weekly September 2018 In Rehman’s debut collection, indelible truths permeate slice-of-life recollections and blustery fantasies of desire. Alienation and intimacy, a sensation of stasis, and the comforts of a Queens immigrant household all mark the speaker’s physical and emotional universe. Rehman sardonically illuminates social shifts, such as the tensions of a world kept at […]

Author: Bushra Rehman

The Queens Tribune By Thomas Moody August 2018 In the final chapter of Corona, Bushra Rehman’s debut novel, a bread truck breaks down on a cold Queens winter night on the street the neighborhood has unofficially reserved for abandoned cars. What seems like the whole of Corona looks on from their houses, waiting to see […]

Marianna’s Beauty Salon: Two Poems by Bushra Rehman

The Margins  The moon appears / the small clip of a nail a paring knife / a chalk mark / left to linger in the sky pmonaghan/Flickr The Difference It’s the difference between whether you talk to the girl or not whether you carry the moon home in the seat of your pants burning and […]