“The book we need right now.”
“Self-Mythology‘s achievement is, variously, how poetry’s nowhere and nothing can be a home, too. A home whose blueprints are in Whitmanian contradictions and whose walls are erected in their own belonging, which are rooted in love.” —Yanyi
“At the limits of language, of what is knowable and sayable, Keramati treats selfhood, inheritance, and the voyeurism of identity with a skepticism, acknowledging the labor of having to explain oneself when one is also trying to protect oneself from being excavated. Self-Mythology is a refreshing, smart, unromanticized understanding of home and homeland that pushes back on capitalist understandings of otherness in favor of something more beautifully un-heroic and human.” — Megan Fernandes, author of I Do Everything I’m Told
“These astonishing poems, crackling with wit and music, scrutinize and shoulder the histories that hammer the self into existence. The poems are rendered in language so beautiful, so startling I often gasped. Saba Keramati is an immensely gifted poet. In Self-Mythology, she reminds us the self is plural, fluid. Her interrogations are empowering and instructive and deftly crafted.” —Eduardo C. Corral
“Self-Mythology, is the book we need right now, as so many of us explore our hyphenated selves, searching for meaning in being not all one and not all the other, wondering if and where we are truly rooted. But even as we turn inward for clues, we’re a suspicious, judgmental lot, and so much of the volatile confusion that marks our days springs from a brash selfishness—our unwillingness to consider the person next to us, to learn what that person feels and believes, the tenets they live by. Keramati first confronts the formidable task of knowing the body and mind she inhabits— her backdrops and looming future, her vulnerabilities and failures, her reactions to loss and love, the experience of being two in the body of one.”
— Patricia Smith
— Patricia Smith