High Desert
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About this ebook
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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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