Full Description
High Desert is a psychedelic journal of end-times and an ode to the American Southwest. Exploring such key events as the First Red Scare, the Tulsa Race Massacre and the West Coast's wildfire epidemic, Naffis-Sahely's reflections on class, race, and nationalism chart the region's hidden histories from the Spanish Colonial Era to the recent pandemic. The poems in High Desert also revel in their rootlessness, as the author shifts his gaze outside of the US, travelling from Venice and Florence to Chittagong and St Petersburg, tackling our turbulent times and the depths of its problems in searing, extraordinary poems of witness and vision.
High Desert is André Naffis-Sahely's second collection, following his debut The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017), a gathering of portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: travellers, labourers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. It includes poems from his recent pamphlet The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). All his collections present poetry as reportage, as much an act of memory as of sinuous, clear-eyed vision.
André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, editor and translator, and editor of Poetry London. He is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Manchester Writing School in the UK, and a Lecturer at University of California, Davis, in the US.
Contents
I: PEREGRINATIONS
11 The Last Communist
13 The Other Side of Nowhere
15 Folie à trois
16 Nova Atlantis
17 Spaghetti Westerns
19 Montricher
20 Young Romantics
21 Chittagong
22 Ierapetra
23 The Train to St Petersburg
25 Ode to the Errant King
II: THE CITY OF ANGELS
29 Welcome to America
30 The Year of One Thousand Fires
32 Maybe The People Don't Want to Live and Let Live
34 The Bond
36 El Molino Viejo
38 Rancheros
III: HIGH DESERT
43 Roadrunners
45 At the Graves of Labour's Fallen
47 [IWW leaflet, 1919]
48 Spanish Flu
49 Memorial Day
50 The Great Molasses Disaster
51 Down to Tucson
52 High Desert
IV: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE WEST
57 Pablo Tac
58 Mary Ellen Pleasant
59 Article Nineteen
60 Denis Kearney
61 Wong Chin Foo
62 Ricardo Flores Magón
63 Louise Bryant
64 Buck Colbert Franklin
65 Art Shields
66 George S. Patton
67 John Samuelson
68 Muriel Rukeyser
69 Richard M. Nixon
V: CODA
73 Tule Fog
79 Notes
