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    High Desert
    High Desert
    High Desert
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    High Desert

    By Andre Naffis-Sahely

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateJun 23, 2022
    ISBN9781780376219
    High Desert
    Author

    Andre Naffis-Sahely

    André Naffis-Sahely's translations include Abdellatif Laabi's The Bottom of the Jar, Honoré de Balzac's The Physiology of the Employee and Émile Zola's Money. His Selected Poems of Abdellatif Laabi was recently selected for a 'Writers in Translation' award by English PEN. He reviews for The Nation and The Times Literary Supplement.

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      Book preview

      High Desert - Andre Naffis-Sahely

      André Naffis-Sahely

      HIGH DESERT

      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, 2017).

      ‘High Desert places Naffis-Sahely among our most indispensable poets, those who, throughout history, testify to the truths of poetry against the lies of violent, destructive, corrupt, oligarchic power.’ – Lawrence Joseph

      ‘Naffis-Sahely’s desert is a space for reckoning. Not many poets have the courage to begin a book with a poem titled ‘The Last Communist’, in praise of a wounded and much-needed, though endangered species of thinker and doer in these acquisitive times. He reminds us of the work that poetry can do when properly deployed.’ – Fred D’Aguiar

      Cover photograph: Western Wildfires, Juniper Hills, California, 18 September 2020 Ringo H W Chiu/AP/Shutterstock

      ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY

      High Desert

      for Zinzi

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      I am grateful to the editors of the publications where some of these poems first appeared: Academy of American Poets, Bennington Review, Fifth Estate, Gutter, The London Magazine, The New European, New Statesman, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry Ireland Review, Pratik, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, and Wildness; as well as the following anthologies: Poets Respond to Covid-19 (Shearsman Press, 2021), And We Came Outside Again and Saw the Stars (Restless Books, 2020) and Field Notes on Survival (Bad Betty Press, 2020). ‘Roadrunners’ was recorded for the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Now podcast series.

      My thanks are also due to the publishers of two pamphlets where some of the poems in this volume first appeared: Forgotten Californians (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2018) and The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). Special thanks to Fred D’Aguiar, Lawrence Joseph, Neil Astley, Alba Ziegler-Bailey, Nina Hervé, Will Burns, Mark Davidson, and Declan Ryan.

      CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Acknowledgements

      I: PEREGRINATIONS

      The Last Communist

      The Other Side of Nowhere

      Folie à trois

      Nova Atlantis

      Spaghetti Westerns

      Montricher

      Young Romantics

      Chittagong

      Ierapetra

      The Train to St Petersburg

      Ode to the Errant King

      II: THE CITY OF ANGELS

      Welcome to America

      The Year of One Thousand Fires

      Maybe the People Don’t Want to Live and Let Live

      The Bond

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