High Desert

The second collection from Naffis-Sahely (The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life) celebrates the desert landscapes of the Southwest while highlighting devastating and complex historical moments, among them the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Divided into five sections, the poems establish their concerns and motifs across shifting cities, while blending personal and political history. In “Folie à trois,” he writes: “Years later,// I still don’t know where or whether to grieve,/ but in a way, I won’t have to. You always did say/ that true migrants ought to be buried upright/ like the Kurdish warriors of old, ever ready for battle....” Similarly, in the prose poem “Nova Atlantis,” personal reflection intermingles with sharp insight, “In the thirty years I’ve been alive the city’s bled half its people and each new decade swallows another step of Istrian stone... {...} the winged golden lions still clutch their swords and tablets of the Law, but never all that convincingly.” Naffis-Sahely offers a fresh approach to weaving reportage and confession in this absorbing travelogue. (Aug.)