David Woo Recommends Saba Keramati, Justin Rovillos Monson, Robert Pinsky, and Others at LitHub in his new article “Holding Up Mirrors to the Self: 7 New Poetry Collections to Read This June.”
“With a kind of double-mirror infinitude,” Woo writes, “the debut poet Saba Keramati employs the cento form, which repeats lines by other poets, and quotes a line by the poet Sarah Gambito: ‘I’m a poem someone else wrote for me’—in other words, a poet writing a poem that quotes a poem in which another poet declares that she’s a poem written by someone else for her, perhaps the future poet who is quoting her back.
Read the full article at LitHub.
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.
Self-Mythology was a finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith.
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.