Thrust Outward

André Naffis-Sahely’s High Desert journeys from the American Southwest to Mexico, Switzerland, Bangladesh and Crete. This work quickly focuses our attention on the uncomfortable inevitably of artificial borders: ‘Consider the border, / any border. If a border is a war zone, then what do the insides of our consciousness look like?’ (‘Ode to the Errant King’) and the personal connections to people on other sides: ‘in my head, an email from my mother / that read, “we’re doomed, save what you can”’ (‘The Other Side of Nowhere’).

The horrors of history are sometimes eased into the poems: in ‘Maybe the People Don’t Want to Live and Let Live’, he begins ‘Sun-drunk, I roll / along the streets of Los Angeles, / while the radio rewrites / the world as I know it’ and historic intervention appears across all five parts of the collection: ‘Driving in every direction / down licks of red road, / I have lost myself in militarized topography’ (‘Roadrunners’).

The penultimate section of ‘A People’s History of the West’ works well in its use of ‘found poems’, as Naffis-Sahely describes them. He manipulates the written and spoken language of historical figures, including Muriel Rukeyser and her FBI file: ‘other poems by this author could not / have been written except in a period / of disordered economics’. Perhaps it is also true of Naffis-Sahely that the poems of High Desert couldn’t have been written except in this period of global disorder.

High Desert uses historical reflections and asks readers to consider their evolving ...