Self-Mythology: Poems [Paperback]

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’sSelf-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.“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 ofDream 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. InSelf-Mythology, she reminds us the self is plural, fluid. Her interrogations are empowering and instructive and deftly crafted.”
—Eduardo C. Corral, author ofGuillotine&llóÞ