Self-Mythology: Poems

by Saba Keramati

Overview

Winner, 2025 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610758222
Publisher:	University of Arkansas Press
Publication date:	04/29/2024
Series:	Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	68
File size:	948 KB

About the Author

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.
 

Table of Contents

Contents Series Editor’s Preface THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO SAY THIS * Hollowed The Dream The Act Are There Words for This Self-Portrait as Two Chimera Inside Persepolis Self-Portrait with Crescent Moon and Plum Blossoms Questions for the Outward Curve of My Stomach, Where I Sometimes Rest My Hand and Pretend to Be Pregnant What’s Lost The Birth of Language Cento for Loneliness & Writer’s Block & the Fear of Never Being Enough, Despite Being Surrounded by Asian American Poets Haibun for Learning 中文 on Duolingo With a dull blade, I cut the lamb’s tongue In the Smoke of the Wild Rue Seeds Self-Portrait Alone in the Kitchen Invocation Those Who Live Dream of Liminal Space Nocturne in Which I Give Myself unto Another The God Who Ate His Children Devotion Fire Season Grows Longer Disappointing Things World War 3 Is Trending on Twitter At the lakeshore I am reminded that we are different Ars Poetica Ghazal Cento for Loneliness & Writer’s Block & the Fear of Never Being Enough, Despite Being Surrounded by Asian American Poets II My Aquarius moon won’t let me rest Ode to Birthmark Relics for My Future Rewrite: I Go Back Accidental Loss Ghosts The Return Cento for Loneliness & Writer’s Block & the Fear of Never Being Enough, Despite Being Surrounded by Asian American Poets III In the Beginning There Were Fires Self-Portrait without Plans or Prayers What Remains After 9/11 We Wonder If We Should Ever Celebrate Self-Portrait with Womanhood Lump Eye Self-Mythology Inside the Museum, a Remnant America in Spring Reflections of Heaven Self-Portrait as a Bowl of Persimmons Feast Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

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

“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

“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

“Keramati takes confessional poetics to new heights, scrutinizing the self as a site excavated, and the home(lands) as a body whose scattered limbs might yet be reassembled. A number of lines are seared into my brain, triumphant and forthright in their brilliance.”
—Sarah Ghazal Ali, Electric Lit, April 2024

From the Publisher