“The book we need right now.”
—Patricia Smith
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. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society.
“So many writers are telling these stories—or making their best attempts to. Keramati avoids the many pitfalls of addressing a complex identity—you won’t find confounding DIY tanglings of language or an unwavering eye fixed on the myriad metaphors of culture clash. Self-Mythology’s poems unreel with revelation, undaunted soul-searching, and crisp, deliberate lyric.”
— Patricia Smith
What Others Are Saying
“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
a playlist for Self-Mythology by Saba