The University of Arkansas Press is proud to announce the publication of Self-Mythology: Poems by Saba Keramati. A finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith, Self-Mythology will be published in the spring of 2024.
“A revelatory collection,” said Smith, who describes Keramati as a “Chinese Iranian poet who, with a deft eye and lush lines, tenaciously explores the weaving of a life so rarely hyphenated.”
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.
Saba Keramati is a writer, editor, and educator from the Bay Area. A winner of the 2023 92NY Discovery Poetry Contest, she received her MFA from UC Davis. Her writings have appeared in Adroit Journal, AGNI, The Margins, Poet Lore, and other publications. The poetry editor for Sundog Lit, Keramati currently lives in Dearborn, Michigan, with her partner and cats.