Rumpus
By Tamiko Beyer | Oct. 2018
“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 growing up in Corona, an immigrant neighborhood in Queens where too-loved-to-be-abandoned sofa beds bloomed in front yards. At a recent reading, sponsored by the community and literary organizations Kundiman and NY Writers Coalition, Rehman talked about the current resident of the White House as “a Queens bully.” I was intrigued.”
Publisher’s Weekly
May 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 bay by a “white picket fence, no, try chain link.” There is also romance, as the speaker imagines her and her lover’s skeletons in a museum: “Will they ever know/ this flesh answered the other/ that my fingers traveled all over/ the empty space around your bones.”