ABOUT THIS BOOK

Daniel Khalastchi boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms. Exhilarating and innovative, The Story of Your Obstinate Survival collapses genre and upends narrative convention with dazzling wordplay and thrilling imagery. Inhabiting a world trapped somewhere between dreams and reality, these poems fuse the political and personal, public and private, pleasing and piquant, to examine both calamities and the dogged persistence required to endure. On display throughout is Khalastchi’s exceptional capacity for detail and specificity, filling up this world to the point of breaking but never beyond, insisting on survival despite it all.

Crowds around the circus serve as means of an escape,
a legislative party bus of palliative care. There standing
by the advent tent are penitential dentures, striking in
their likeness to entire choking towns. Backed down
and bound the carnival carnivorous is glowing, a
midway ways away alit and stilted by the night.
—Excerpt from “Trying to I Can’t Hit Anything Yet the Bodies Pile Up”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Daniel Khalastchi is an Iraqi Jewish American, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is the author of three previous books of poetry—Manoleria, Tradition, and American Parables—and lives in Iowa City, where he directs the University of Iowa’s Magid Center for Writing.

REVIEWS

“Like a new angel of history, The Story of Your Obstinate Survival arrives with its wings heavy with live fish and doorknobs, shovels and bone cake, faith and desire. Khalastchi has turned the poem into a long, beautiful wail, soft and brilliant enough for even Babel and Kafka and Singer to hear. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out Khalastchi feeds each poem by hand, and brushes nightly their wings. With as much abandon as with hope, these poems sway on the edge of a miracle.”—Sabrina Orah Mark

“It’s The Story of Your Obstinate Survival, and mondegreen, malaprop, misremembering member these casted lines even as these lines cast a motley populace: holler at me wayward new Senator, honeymooners of the lusophone, mid friend, X-ray techs, and expecting pessimists. Expecting textual comic strips? Natch. Still catch the catastrophes beneath the cackling, between ill chimes and rhymes, the jinglejangle Daniel Khalastchi entangles in his syntax; he sets the lexical to play with itself roughly; sees the Locked-Downers stuffed in meat lockers; proffers ruefully to the newly born/newly gone: ‘there is no use trying/to stop the wreckage.’ Heck, all that glass and metal really sounds pretty.”—Douglas Kearney

“The Story of Your Obstinate Survival lays out an uneasy dreamscape of middle-class, middle-aged life at what can feel like the end of a world. The immediate stuff and facts of that life—the roof, medication, cars, relationships, real estate agents, the occasional wild animal—all threaten to come apart in ways that feel as familiar as they do unreal or impossible. Through these strange scenes, Khalastchi rides sonic associations, hopes, regrets, histories, revealing an intelligent figure trying to puzzle out what it means to go on and finding little moments of humor along the way. This is a moving, compelling collection, a vital documentation of a life in uncertain times.”—Heather Christle

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I Want to Be a Better Friend, I’m Sorry