Full Description
Poems that imagine Persian and Iranian American lives.
In Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Susan Atefat-Peckham troubles preconceptions of nationhood and fixed systems of power by bringing the reader into the Iranian American home, offering glimpses of familial love and intimacy. Atefat-Peckham reaches for a network of care—the foundations of which are located in the ability of these poems to evoke the rich landscape of Iranian American lives. Articulating a spirituality that has no spatial or temporal boundaries, one which travels effortlessly between life and death, this collection is a treatise on the empathy we need now more than ever.
An up-and-coming poet who died just four years after winning the National Poetry Series Award in 2000, Susan Atefat-Peckham was deeply concerned by the Islamophobic "Axis of Evil" rhetoric deployed after 9/11 and was skeptical of attempts by the United States to "democratize" the Middle East. Representing the lives of immigrants in the United States and Persians in Iran, as well as the distance that separates their experiences and the love that binds them together, Atefat-Peckham brings an important voice to that conflict—one of the family and the home, where glimpses of intimacy and care rival imperial oppression.
Contents
Foreword Darius Atefat-Peckham
Smuggling (A Short Essay)
Night Conversations
I: Appearances
Small Things
How to Get to the House on Takhti Street
Clean
Ghossam Remembers His Brother
Hats
Faces
Outside the Mosque
The Meanings of Names
Appearances
How to Cut
Agha Rashid Breathes In
Nina Hears
The Memory of Cells
Nina Calls
Why They Attacked
Bars
II: Lovers
The Anatomy of Hands
At the Airport
Lovers
Ai'd Mobarack
Vessels
Hunger
Dissecting Turtles (added)
Sestinelle for Travelers
Filling the Spaces We Know
Walking Home in Autumn
To My Unborn Son
To My Son at Seven Months
To My Son at Ten Months
III: Continuance
Tara
At Night
Ghossam Sleeps
Who?
A Visitor
Zeeba Says
In the Morning
Lower Manhattan
Torches
Interring the Body
Continuance
Light
Instructions on What to Say First at a Muslim Burial
Where You Are
