“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.

“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.”

“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 of something more beautifully un-heroic and human.