American Parables

Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-0-299-33574-8
Verlag: University of Wisconsin Press

Buch, Englisch, 120 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 137 mm x 188 mm, Gewicht: 136 g

Reihe: Wisconsin Poetry Series

Daniel Khalastchi's third collection provides an uncompromising exploration into the political and societal disturbances facing America today. Electioneering, lack of affordable health care, the increase in mass shootings, and the continued fight for equal rights are juxtaposed against an unlikely sense of hope and optimism. Lurking behind each page is the ever-present issue of immigration, with specific focus on the escape of the author's father from Iraq and the pressures linked to living as an Arab Jew in the middle of the United States.

Through unnerving gallows humor and radical honesty, these poems redefine the American experience by asking the reader to consider what it means to live in the shadow of a perceived sense of freedom and to have faith when believing feels hopeless. Khalastchi's perspective as an Iraqi Jewish American brings sharp focus to the holistic uncertainties of religion, politics, assimilation, illness, love, and loss—with absurd, visceral, and wry acclaim.

I type into

the internet your high school

and find rubble. Your daughter

has the flu. We are sick

with disappointment but

everyone is fine.
—Excerpt from "First Generation: Our Escape"

Autoren/Hrsg.

Khalastchi, Daniel

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Party to a Crime
- American Parable
- Laid Land
- Border Strikes Amid Talks of Withdrawal
- Visiting Hours
- Juridical Bench Operation
- Trigger Warning
- First Generation: Your Escape
- Audience Holding Index
- Our Bed and Its Position
- American Parable
- Two-State Solution
- Unsuccessful Test Launch During Easter Parade
- I Do Not Have the Market Cornered on Feeling Angry and Misused
- Trigger Warning
- Threat of War in Spring
- Last Poem Before Marriage
- When on the Scale of Human Suffering
- Returning Home from Having Failed
- Land Resettlement Contract
- Trigger Warning
- Deviation on Returns
- American Parable
- Congenital Persuasion Spectacle
- First Generation: Your War
- This Indigenous Tsuris
- Trigger Warning
- With Me You Are Inviting Trouble
- American Parable
- Our Shared Relevant Irrelevance or A Brief History of Love
- Secessional Impulse
- American Parable
- Affordable Care
- Trigger Warning
- You Ridiculous People
- An Apt Rapture
- Institutional Concern
- The Social Purpose
- Storm Drives Us Away
- The Violence of Missing You
- Trigger Warning
- First Generation: Our Escape
- Sad Festival of Mild Disruption
- Trigger Warning
- American Parable
- Peptic Babylonian Ulcer
- What I Have to Offer
- First Poem After Marriage
- Notes and Acknowledgments

Über Autor(innen)

Daniel Khalastchi is the author of Manoleria and Tradition, and his poems have appeared in The Believer Logger, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, and The Rumpus. He lives in Iowa City where he directs the University of Iowa's Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing; he is also the co-founder and managing editor of Rescue Press.