High Desert

by André Naffis-Sahely

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.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published June 23, 2022

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 2 out of 5]

I consistently have a hard time reading political poetry. Not because it's political. But because there is a tendency to prioritize politics to poetry in the poem. Or the kind of politics that it prioritizes is the unambiguous argument about Issue A. And possibly the complication of that unambiguous argument by referencing Issue B that might make the reader see Issue A a little differently. But, really, the poem isn't interested in you see Issue A differently, only turning up the rhetorical volume to explain why Issue A should be that much more important.

And in all this, the poetry gets left to the side. Or that's what this book has done. The poems provide as much access as they can to the poet's political views. And I just don't find myself very interested in that kind of poem. There's no surprise in the poems. Or the surprise has to do with facts that I might not have been aware of regarding a certain issue. And when the new facts are brought in, there's not really a poetic moment in the reveal. It's all straight talk.

And it's disappointing for me. Especially given the frame laid out by the first few poems of the book. It is evident this poet writes from an international perspective. But, for my reading, that rootlessness is quickly focused on a single-dimensional social critique based on the life he's lived. And, in addition to the predictable rhetoric of most of the poems, it's the poet's presumed and uninterrogated authority that I find dragging on the poems.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shifted from 4 to 5 not because "amazing" says anything more than "really like it" but because these well-made poems are aligned with questions of past/present (in)justice that trouble the too-smooth waters of american exceptionalisms ... and that pleases me ... a lot.

[Michelle McGrane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Day Four Choice

The Sealey Challenge 2022 (Poetry)

[Ami Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pure gorgeousness

[Andy Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the very best books that I have ever read. Beautiful and honest.