High Desert

High Desert is 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 current
pandemic. The poems in High Desert also revel in their
rootlessness, as the author shifts his gaze outside of the US,
traveling 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.

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