Forthcoming April 2024
“The book we need right now.”
—Patricia Smith
full words by Patricia Smith
“Self-Mythology, by Chinese-Iranian poet Saba Keramati, 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. In her poem “The Act,” she writes, “I’ll always be / here, chameleoning myself // with every shift of the light.”
So many writers are telling these stories—or making their best attempts to. Keramati avoids the many pitfalls of addressing a complex identity—you won’t find confounding DIY tanglings of language or an unwavering eye fixed on the myriad metaphors of culture clash. Self-Mythology’s poems unreel with revelation, undaunted soul-searching, and crisp, deliberate lyric:
“Let me write myself here, with these symbols /I claim to know, swear are in my lineage—/ proving myself to my own desire/ to be seen.”
What Others Are Saying
“What does it mean to belong? Is it citizenship? A social role? A family of origin? Keramati’s speaker searches for these answers through the loneliness of being from ‘a country that doesn’t exist’. 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, Dream of the Divided Field
“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, Guillotine
““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 something more beautifully un-heroic and human.”
— Megan Fernandes, I Do Everything I’m Told
a playlist by saba