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Daniel Khalastchi boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms. Exhilarating and innovative,
The Story of Your Obstinate Survival collapses genre and upends narrative convention with dazzling wordplay and thrilling imagery. Inhabiting a world trapped somewhere between dreams and reality, these poems fuse the political and personal, public and private, pleasing and piquant, to examine both calamities and the dogged persistence required to endure. On display throughout is Khalastchi's exceptional capacity for detail and specificity, filling up this world to the point of breaking but never beyond, insisting on survival despite it all.
About the author
Daniel Khalastchi is an Iraqi Jewish American, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is the author of three previous books of poetry--
Manoleria,
Tradition, and
American Parables--and lives in Iowa City, where he directs the University of Iowa's Magid Center for Writing.
Summary
Boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms as a way of asking: In the face of incessant turmoil, how do we go on? This exhilarating and innovative book collapses genre and upends narrative convention with dazzling wordplay and thrilling imagery.
