High Desert
High Desert is an ode to the American Southwest, exploring such key events as the First Red Scare, the Tulsa Race Massacre and the West Coast’s wildfire epidemic.
Naffis-Sahely’s reflections on class, race, and nationalism chart the region’s hidden histories from the Spanish Colonial Era to the current pandemic. The poems in High Desert also revel in their rootlessness, as the author shifts his gaze outside of the US, traveling from Venice and Florence to Chittagong and St Petersburg, tackling our turbulent times and the depths of its problems in searing, extraordinary poems of witness and vision.
This is Naffis-Sahely’s second collection, following his debut, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017), a gathering of portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: travelers, laborers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. It includes poems from his recent pamphlet The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). All his collections present poetry as reportage, as much an act of memory as of sinuous, clear-eyed vision. High Desert' in The Telegraph.
André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, editor and translator whose many publications include two collections, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), and a pamphlet, The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He edited The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (2020) and is editor of Poetry London. He is a renowned translator, and several of his titles have been selected as Books of the Year by NPR, The Guardian and Financial Times.
