A debut collection that draws on the poet’s Iranian heritage to process life-altering loss and grief.
 
Darius Atefat-Peckham’s debut poetry collection follows a boy’s coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead.
 
Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother’s poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one’s beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory “like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue.”
 
Book of Kin won the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize.
 

Darius Atefat-Peckham is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems and editor of his mother Susan Atefat-Peckham’s posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Georgia Review, Indiana Review, The Journal, Rattle, and elsewhere and has been published in anthologies including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora. In 2018, he was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet and he is currently a poetry fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.
 

CYRUS, OR TO TOUCH A GHOST
IN A CHILD’S HAND
WINDCHIMES
THE BIRTHDAY FAIRY
THE TURKISH COFFEE LADY
SUNDERED SONNET: IF WE SHOULD BE GHOSTS
MOTHER
SECOND MOTHER
DAR HAVAYAT, IN YOUR AIR
THE PATIENT STONE
ODE TO THE HOUSE WHERE I WAS BORN
THROAT OF YOUR HOUR
ONCE MOURNED
THEY WAKE ME
DEATH REPORT
I LEARN A LANGUAGE I’M TOO AFRAID TO SPEAK
ALL BODIES
IF I WANT TO GO THERE I HAVE TO WATCH WHAT I SAY
ACTIONS, PRESENCES, SCARS
POST-LOSS CHECKLIST
HEATHCLIFFS

THE OUTER REACHES
THE NIGHT BEFORE MY MOTHER DIED, THEY SLEPT (IN SEPARATE ROOMS)
LEARNING TO PRAY
THE STAR-TAKER
OF BLUEBERRIES
IMAGINE THE LAKE. CYRUS IS ALIVE
HAUNT
CORONATION
BOOK OF KIN
SUNDERED SONNET: THEY SAY I SPEAK BETTER PERSIAN THAN MY MOTHER’S, BUT
MEMORIAL MURAL FOR THE PERSIAN [PICASSO]
REPORT CARD
LOVE POEM TO THE GARDEN SNAIL
SURROUNDINGS
SUSIE’S LETTER: AN ERASURE
HOW LONG TO WAIT THERE WHEN THE BREATHING STOPS

Autumn House Poetry Prize, 2023