Overview

In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet’s uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, “You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what’s missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong.” Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.

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9781682262528

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"""At the limits of language, of what is knowable and sayable, Keramati treats selfhood, inheritance, and the voyeurism of identity with a skepticism, acknowledging the labor of having to explain oneself when one is also trying to protect oneself from being excavated. Self-Mythology is a refreshing, smart, unromanticized understanding of home and homeland that pushes back on capitalist understandings of otherness in favor something more beautifully un-heroic and human."" --Megan Fernandes, author of I Do Everything I'm Told ""These astonishing poems, crackling with wit and music, scrutinize and shoulder the histories that hammer the self into existence. The poems are rendered in language so beautiful, so startling I often gasped. Saba Keramati is an immensely gifted poet. In Self-Mythology, she reminds us the self is plural, fluid. Her interrogations are empowering and instructive and deftly crafted."" --Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine ""What does it mean to belong? Is it citizenship? A social role? A family of origin? Keramati's speaker searches for these answers through the loneliness of being from 'a country that doesn't exist'. Self-Mythology's achievement is, variously, how poetry's nowhere and nothing can be a home, too. A home whose blueprints are in Whitmanian contradictions and whose walls are erected in their own belonging, which are rooted in love. --Yanyi, author of Dream of the Divided Field"

Author Information

Saba Keramati is a writer, editor, and educator from the Bay Area. A winner of the 2023 92NY Discovery Poetry Contest, she received her MFA from UC Davis. Her writings have appeared in Adroit Journal, AGNI, The Margins, Poet Lore, and other publications. The poetry editor for Sundog Lit, Keramati currently lives in Dearborn, Michigan, with her partner and cats.

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