Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Poems

Saba Keramati

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781610758222
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• 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 and Writer’s Block and 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 and Writer’s Block and 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 and Writer’s Block and 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