Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of Theophanies, recommends poems that contemplate home, selfhood, legacy, and belonging at Electric Lit in “7 Poetry Collections that Transform the Personal Into Portals.”
Self-Mythology by Saba Keramati
Selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize, Saba Keramati’s debut enacts its title in lyric, cento, and self-portraiture. For Keramati, the hyphen—self-mythology, Chinese-Iranian—is at once a balance beam and a blade: “Two things can be true at once… / Hand pressed against glass hand.” Haunting and transfixing, these poems reckon with the inherited body and inhabited mind, collecting fragments to assemble a self. In “Self-Portrait with Crescent Moon and Plum Blossoms,” she writes, “I shape myself with the emblems I gather. / Let me write myself here…” Keramati takes confessional poetics to new heights, scrutinizing the self as a site excavated, and the home(lands) as a body whose scattered limbs might yet be reassembled. A number of lines are seared into my brain, triumphant and forthright in their brilliance—“Still / I am not so bold to think I am beyond my imagination.”
Read about all the book Sarah selected at Electric Lit.
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.