Self-Mythology: Poems

by Saba Keramati

In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet’s uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, “You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what’s missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong.” Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.

Genres: Poetry, Womens, China, Nonfiction, Adult

88 pages, Paperback

Published March 21, 2024

Reviews

[Brittany Mishra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A searching collection of poems. This book is not only looking for self-discovery, but it is also a book of resistance by building a self that is expansive, takes up space and declares everything and anything, without hesitation.

[Mya Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

“what forgiveness is necessary /
for someone doing their best?”

When I tell you every single poem was a complete and absolute banger. This is how I'm tryna be!

[*.✧ m i k h a ✧.* · Rating 3 out of 5]

...my conception of myself is solitary without worship. What's the difference between a person and a prayer?

3.5☆
Keramati presents her audience with such an honest reflection on identity, culture, and womanhood. Her rumination on these topics made me think about my own identity and what it means to me - who am I? What makes me? I liked what she had to offer and valued her perspective. Looking forward to what more she writes.

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another poet and poetry I liked from the first poem (and on to the end of the book). I must be onto something.

[Hannah D · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a joy to read! So many of these poems will be living in my brain for the next couple months. I really really adored this collection. “Chimera”, “Invocation”, and “Feast” were some of the poems that really stuck out to me!

[Lou Q · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars
This collection has a lot of excellent poems that are beautifully reflective on the author’s life and identity. The way she talks about being mixed is incredibly relatable and really captures both the struggle of coming to terms with how other people look at you and how you look at yourself.

“obsessed with discovery and answers because: how devastating to be wrong about who you are. Did god give us all the same questions?” (15)

“I am here to speak / to my great-grandmother, / but I cannot call to her / because she has no name. / Instead I hum a lullaby […] I am begging to be haunted” (48-49)

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels so morally questionable to "rate" a poetry book - I find that poets do often write about themselves/their own experiences (often, though not always), and assigning a rating on people's life experiences feels very wrong, problematic, and just now the way I see poetry (see: my review on Rupi Kaur's books).

At the same time, I want to note that this poetry text just didn't make me go "Wow" as much as some other poetry books did, and it's a poetry book that I liked, but I don't think I'll really go back to/re-read this entire text. There is NOTHING for me to critique about the content of the book itself - the issues that Saba Keramati discusses is moving, beautiful, so important, and my rating is not in reference to that. It's more of a her poetry style isn't really for me situation? I wish there was more from the poems because, at least, from my own limited understand and interpretation, there were poems which felt like they were repeating the theme of unbelonging/being multi-racial/America's imperialism, where I wished there was perhaps even a deeper exploration of these themes beyond what I had originally - for lack of a better word -anticipated.

I also think this may be a result of how I find myself writing about motherhood, belonging, mother-daughter relationship, and America a lot (and we both grew up in the Bay Area in California). Obviously we have absolutely different experiences, and I am not claiming "similarity" or a completely false "oh my god I relate!!!." There are many of her poems that resonated with me, but I also feel strangely less "moved"/"struck" by her poems perhaps because they feel strangely familiar and comprehensible to me. I really don't know. I'm just rambling about my thoughts at this point. Finally, my last point is that I wish she had done more with her line breaks, but this is just a personal opinion from someone with like zero formal creative writing training and has little experience with craft. There are endings of poems that I just wished could have made me go "woah" or that "WOW" factor instead of being simply good endings. Again, the bar I have for poetry is so high due to other texts where poem after poem ends with a line that has me repeating it over and over again.

FINALLY, disclaimer: I am not multi-racial, and this could just be a me problem with wishing that there was a more extensive exploration - further specificity - to the way in which America commits violence abroad. There's some poems in this collection that I absolutely loved and will go back to. the end of the day, I just don't think it's right to rate a poetry book. I'm giving this a four stars and writing this review just so I go back and recognize that, hey, this book wasn't for me, but I thought this poetry book was great! Still would recommend.

[Pedro · Rating 5 out of 5]

“God is so singular in his existence.
It must be lonely. All that power.
No one to share it with. I think it is a price
I would pay, lonely as I am.
I have been looking for another like me
and I have yet to find them. Still
I am not so bold to think I am beyond
imagination…
…
All this to say, my conception of myself
is solitary without worship…
…
I dream of a future me, and maybe she
is the god I invoke, the one I beseech to live.”

— excerpted from the poem, “Invocation”

Let me start by saying that I low key LOVE when a book is slim yet contains so much! In Saba Keramati’s debut poetry collection, SELF-MYTHOLOGY we get just that in a book filled with 49 poems — you bet I was very thrilled to start reading! 🙌🏽🤩🙏🏽

In the first poem, “THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO SAY THIS,” we are presented with the poet as Chinese-Iranian through her parents and the language they speak, the way English and more so, America, makes one “move closer to a life without language.”

In the poem, “Chimera,” Keramati says, “I admit / I am interested in my own thinking, obsessed with discovery and answers / because: how devastating to be wrong about who you are.” These are the sort of lines that stuck out to me in this book — “There are too many truths here” as the first poem says.

In “Self-Portrait with Crescent Moon and Plum Blossoms,” we get this image of “mosquitoes / running rampant” and i like how the stinging that occurs, that pain is indicative of how the poet feels: “Suck the unbelonging // out of me,” she implores. Then says a little later:

“I shape myself with the emblems I can gather.
Let me write myself here, with these symbols
I claim to know, swear are in my lineage—

proving myself to my own desire
to be seen.” ✨

The relationship between the poet and poetry is also on display in this book as she notes how she has “always shrouded [herself] in poems. / I thought I was clever but I was hiding.” SAME!! 🙈

“There is so much left to understand.
There are things I do not know about my ancestry

because I am afraid to ask.
Where would I put it down?”

Other poems that I love:
The “Cento for Loneliness & Writer’s Block & the Fear of Never Being Enough, Despite Being Surrounded by Asian American Poets” I, II, & III:❣️
“Devotion”: ❤️‍🔥
“Fire Season Grows Longer”: A poem I almost considered starting my post with and hope to lead a future post with when I reread the book 🌎
“Ars Poetica Ghazal”: YUP another one to reflect upon revisiting in a post!
“Rewrite: I Go Back”: this one inspired me to start a poem and and need to go back to doing just that on my next writing session ✍🏽

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alive to the moment, but also beautifully dying in the perceived past of passage, Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology is an adult prayer of verse offered to the childish angel’s extra ghost. By which I mean it knows the black speech of plenty is lacking, and that language is a body no god can cut in half. If it left me speechless, it also silenced me in the looking. Keramati has an eye that interrogates vision with both image and with the after that image denies hallucinating within. Tanks carry the same indifference everywhere, and violence makes a glistening listener of the unheard weapon. It’s a very born thing. And a thing that hatches in the space the egg dreams it has reserved. It hurts, heals. Blood turns to blood from seeing salt.

[Shze-Hui Tjoa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous, searching and powerful collection. I feel like I'm going to be mulling over what Keramati has written for a long time - about selfhood, belonging, ancestry, daughterhood/motherhood, and the role that language plays or doesn't play in affirming existence. "Chimera" and "Self-Portrait as a Bowl of Persimmons" are two of my favourites poems (I first read "Chimera" when it was published outside of this collection, and couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks afterwards!!). Highly highly recommend.

[Bella · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointed to find this such a miss for me personally, especially as a fellow mixed person. I felt the poems lacked weight or a tether to the earth, even though I did like 3. How subjective poetry is. Anyway, really didn't like this collection and kind of tired of the topic.

[Sarah Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible debut from a talented poet—these poems are sharp, introspective, and textured—to read them is to embody them, to feel their weight in your mouth. Highly recommend. And what a cover!!!

[Veronica M · Rating 5 out of 5]

A true multi-racial queen. THANK YOU FOR MAKING ME FEEL SEEN AND HEARD. Defs going to be sharing with my students. *chefs kiss*

[Elley Shin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought there was some very good poems with great prose, but others I thought felt a bit overdone

[Neha A · Rating 2 out of 5]

some cool bits (1.5 rounded up to 2) but folks chiding Elizabeth Gilbert for narcissism in Big Magic would benefit from reading this

[Jasmine J · Rating 5 out of 5]

such an amazing and beautiful poetry collection

[Jacqueline Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite collections of this year. Keramati’s poems are cutting, intimate, and insightful, beautifully towing the line between personal and universal.

[Connie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chosen by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series, Keramati’s gorgeous debut collection examines the body, family, language, time, and, of course, the self: the dream self, remembered self, “shadow-self,” self-portraits. I revisited stunning moments—like, from “Disappointing Things,” “The bottom of a grown-up’s foot, when compared to a baby’s”—so often that I reread the book cover to cover within seven weeks of finishing it. With a breadth of forms, cento, pantoum, haibun, and ode, these pages whisper and scream, sing and undo, cuddle up in the heart and stay. Reach for these moving poems, as I have and will do again and again.

from "The Best Books of 2024" via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/best-books-2024/