André Naffis-Sahely

High Desert

Publication Date : 23 Jun 2022

ISBN: 9781780376202

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

High Desert is a psychedelic journal of end-times and an ode to the American Southwest. Exploring such key events as the First Red Scare, the Tulsa Race Massacre and the West Coast’s wildfire epidemic, Naffis-Sahely’s reflections on class, race, and nationalism chart the region’s hidden histories from the Spanish Colonial Era to the recent pandemic. The poems in High Desert also revel in their rootlessness, as the author shifts his gaze outside of the US, travelling from Venice and Florence to Chittagong and St Petersburg, tackling our turbulent times and the depths of its problems in searing, extraordinary poems of witness and vision.

High Desert is André Naffis-Sahely’s second collection, following his debut The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017), a gathering of portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: travellers, labourers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. It includes poems from his recent pamphlet The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). All his collections present poetry as reportage, as much an act of memory as of sinuous, clear-eyed vision.

‘The globe-trotting André Naffis-Sahely’s High Desert is worth tracking down for its compelling central sequence of found poems resurrecting figures from American history.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph (the 20 best poetry books of 2022 to buy for Christmas)

‘I’ve long admired the topical intelligence of André Naffis-Sahely not only as poetry editor but especially in his recent High Desert for its counter to domi-nant narratives, its elastic sensibility (that encircles the globe) and firm sense of a politics that shapes poetry’s aesthetics.’ - Fred D'Aguiar (Poetry Society Books of the Year 2022)

'As landscapes go, deserts are more interchangeable than most, and Naffis-Sahely’s visions of dereliction are eerily arid and universal at once. Identities are layered one on top of another as the poet moves from continent to continent... This is fierce writing too: litanies of the lost, dispatches from desperate outposts and borders... in an inert and supine world, these are impeccably upright poems.' - David Wheatley, The Guardian (best recent poetry round-up)

‘The precision of the writing in André Naffis-Sahely’s new collection of poems gives a laser focus to a vision it’s tempting to call global… History writing, travel writing, journalism – High Desert braids together strands of all these genres without ceding its status as poetic utterance… Naffis-Sahely joins an international cohort of poets – Marilyn Hacker, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Lawrence Joseph and Ilya Kaminsky among them – who are courageously facing ruin without succumbing to silence or despair. Their work isn’t easy to read. But it is well worth reading.’ – Rachel Hadas, Times Literary Supplement

‘It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a collection of poetry as much as André Naffis-Sahely’s new offering, High Desert. That said, ‘enjoy’ isn’t quite the mot juste, for while there is at times dark humour here, these are unapologetically serious poems about serious subjects. Perhaps it’s better to say I was affected and struck by their moral backbone and searing honesty, than merely entertained… these are poems of remarkable moral heft and power, that demand to be given their place in our imaginations.’ - Richie McCaffery, Wild Court

'André Naffis-Sahely’s compelling and deeply researched second collection begins in California but blossoms into a globally engaged meditation on history, migration, inclusion, and justice. Drawing on found text from diaries to academic manuscripts and traversing across North America, Europe, and Asia, High Desert is at once humble and unafraid.' - Maggie Wong, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Summer 2022

'The second collection from Naffis-Sahely (The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life) celebrates the desert landscapes of the Southwest while highlighting devastating and complex historical moments, among them the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Divided into five sections, the poems establish their concerns and motifs across shifting cities, while blending personal and political history.... Naffis-Sahely offers a fresh approach to weaving reportage and confession in this absorbing travelogue.' - Publishers Weekly, on High Desert

'A brief review cannot do justice to High Desert—either its seriousness and depth or its understated artistry. But perhaps a brief review can signal that this collection is not simply admirably accomplished but important. And perhaps a brief review can signal that this is a collection not simply to be read but a collection to study.' - Tim Hunt, World Literature Today

'Naffis-Sahely’s desert is a space for reckoning. Not many poets have the courage to begin a book with a poem titled ‘The Last Communist’, in praise of a wounded and much-needed, though endangered species of thinker and doer in these acquisitive times. He reminds us of the work that poetry can do when properly deployed.' – Fred D'Aguiar

‘André Naffis-Sahely’s High Desert radically presents an intensive record of capitalism’s complex forms of local and global enslavements, each poem skillfully and precisely formed, emotionally charged, and morally infused with an acute sense of justice. High Desert places Naffis-Sahely among our most indispensable poets, those who, throughout history, testify to the truths of poetry against the lies of violent, destructive, corrupt, oligarchic power.” – Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (FSG, 2020).

‘Naffis-Sahely’s poems usher the reader in to a world of reversals and risk... His narratives hold memory to account.’ – David Harsent on The Promised Land

‘I much admired André Naffis-Sahely’s sharp meditations on our vast but remarkably homogeneous global landscape.' – Pankaj Mishra on The Promised Land

‘A poetry of things and people, as solid and realised and unforgettable as any of Kris Kristofferson’s band of drifters, juiceheads and lost souls.’ – John Clegg on The Other Side of Nowhere

‘Naffis-Sahely’s best poems are born of alienation and confusion, of an attempt to make sense of some new set of – usually lowered – circumstances. […] His cosmopolitanism is neither idealized nor fetishised.’ – Declan Ryan on The Other Side of Nowhere

André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, editor and translator, and editor of Poetry London. He is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Manchester Writing School in the UK, and a Lecturer at University of California, Davis, in the US.

André Naffis-Sahely reads from High Desert at the 2022 Newcastle Poetry Festival

André Naffis-Sahely reads from his 2022 collection High Desert. He reads: 'Welcome to America'; 'The Bond'; 'Roadrunners'; 'At the Graves of Labour's Fallen'; 'High Desert'; 'George S. Patton' and 'Tule Fog'. Filmed by Peter Hebden. Special thanks to Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts.

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