Description
Book SynopsisHigh 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.
Trade ReviewNaffis-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
André Naffis-Sahely’s High Desert radically presents an intensive record of capitalism’s complex forms of local and global enslavements, each poem skillfully and precisely formed, emotionally charged, and morally infused with an acute sense of justice. 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 * author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (FSG, 2020) *
Naffis-Sahely’s poems usher the reader in to a world of reversals and risk... His narratives hold memory to account. -- David Harsent * on The Promised Land *
I much admired André Naffis-Sahely’s sharp meditations on our vast but remarkably homogeneous global landscape. -- Pankaj Mishra * on The Promised Land *
Table of ContentsI: PEREGRINATIONS 11 The Last Communist 13 The Other Side of Nowhere 15 Folie à trois 16 Nova Atlantis 17 Spaghetti Westerns 19 Montricher 20 Young Romantics 21 Chittagong 22 Ierapetra 23 The Train to St Petersburg 25 Ode to the Errant King II: THE CITY OF ANGELS 29 Welcome to America 30 The Year of One Thousand Fires 32 Maybe The People Don’t Want to Live and Let Live 34 The Bond 36 El Molino Viejo 38 Rancheros III: HIGH DESERT 43 Roadrunners 45 At the Graves of Labour’s Fallen 47 [IWW leaflet, 1919] 48 Spanish Flu 49 Memorial Day 50 The Great Molasses Disaster 51 Down to Tucson 52 High Desert IV: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE WEST 57 Pablo Tac 58 Mary Ellen Pleasant 59 Article Nineteen 60 Denis Kearney 61 Wong Chin Foo 62 Ricardo Flores Magón 63 Louise Bryant 64 Buck Colbert Franklin 65 Art Shields 66 George S. Patton 67 John Samuelson 68 Muriel Rukeyser 69 Richard M. Nixon V: CODA 73 Tule Fog 79 Notes
