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Tradition
The wildly imaginative poems in Daniel Khalastchi’s Tradition bring to life a speaker struggling to find balance between familial pressure and personal identity, religious faith and recognition of the world’s calamities. An Iraqi Jewish American and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Khalastchi’s much-anticipated follow-up to his award-winning debut is a surreal cir de coeur—a darkly humorous wonderland too fantastical and fresh to be doubted.
- GenresPoetry
70 pages, Hardcover
First published April 14, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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August 29, 2015This book peaked at its cover.
August 31, 2019
In "Tradition," Daniel Khalastchi does his best to fulfill the aesthetic of shock--that is, that the quality of the poetry depends on how shocked you can make the reader. Juxtaposing disconnected actions and images suggests that the world does not make sense, but also that, perhaps, the poet is trying too hard.
... An hour passed before
you asked if I was bleeding, and
when I couldn't answer
you struck me again. Do you
think, you said later, our air
depleting while we shared
the last throat lozenge, that male
high school girls' basketball
coaches feel their athletes are
the reason they have such distance
in their marriages? I don't
know, I said. I do, you
said, and you began to
dig us a tunnel with your
teeth...
The collection is filled with death and copulation, suggesting I suppose, our lives. But it all seems overheated, strained. I respect the attempt at the 21st Century version of the Surreal. But it does not work for me here.
The exception is the long "Poem for My Father," which expresses deeper emotions as it suggest a biography we want to know more about. Here the juxtapositions seem to fit a real life and individuality. Here we experience poetry with some power. The rest of the collection pales in comparison.
... An hour passed before
you asked if I was bleeding, and
when I couldn't answer
you struck me again. Do you
think, you said later, our air
depleting while we shared
the last throat lozenge, that male
high school girls' basketball
coaches feel their athletes are
the reason they have such distance
in their marriages? I don't
know, I said. I do, you
said, and you began to
dig us a tunnel with your
teeth...
The collection is filled with death and copulation, suggesting I suppose, our lives. But it all seems overheated, strained. I respect the attempt at the 21st Century version of the Surreal. But it does not work for me here.
The exception is the long "Poem for My Father," which expresses deeper emotions as it suggest a biography we want to know more about. Here the juxtapositions seem to fit a real life and individuality. Here we experience poetry with some power. The rest of the collection pales in comparison.
January 8, 2024
I read "Tradition" using a Russian tarot card as a bookmark. I don't know if that makes any difference.
As most of the other reviews here have noted, the highlight of Daniel Khalastchi's poems—most (all?) of which deal with Jewish identity—is the book's centerpiece, "Poem for My Father." This extended poem that tells the story of his father's escape from anti-Semitism in Iraq in the 1970s and of his father's search for identity, hope, and a home in exile. It's a stunning poem.
I also loved the silly character of the Conversion Rabbi, who appears in various poems throughout the volume and offers strange, surreal, and sometimes crude advice for a proselyte who is converting to Judaism to pursue a romantic relationship. Apart from "Poem for My Father," the Conversion Rabbi poems were my favorite in the book.
As most of the other reviews here have noted, the highlight of Daniel Khalastchi's poems—most (all?) of which deal with Jewish identity—is the book's centerpiece, "Poem for My Father." This extended poem that tells the story of his father's escape from anti-Semitism in Iraq in the 1970s and of his father's search for identity, hope, and a home in exile. It's a stunning poem.
I also loved the silly character of the Conversion Rabbi, who appears in various poems throughout the volume and offers strange, surreal, and sometimes crude advice for a proselyte who is converting to Judaism to pursue a romantic relationship. Apart from "Poem for My Father," the Conversion Rabbi poems were my favorite in the book.
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November 23, 2023Zero stars.
I picked up this book on a whim, having neither heard of, nor known anything, about the book. So I didn’t have any real expectations going into it.
That said, the process of reading this book was extremely uncomfortable. The book was rather bizarre and, often, gruesome.
I did look up the author on Google, just to get a sense of his story and who he is, and was honestly shocked that he’s Jewish. Many of these poems were deeply uncomfortable to read because of the way in which—in my opinion and in my experience of reading it—it makes a mockery of Jewish people…in thought, in action, and in word.
I picked up this book on a whim, having neither heard of, nor known anything, about the book. So I didn’t have any real expectations going into it.
That said, the process of reading this book was extremely uncomfortable. The book was rather bizarre and, often, gruesome.
I did look up the author on Google, just to get a sense of his story and who he is, and was honestly shocked that he’s Jewish. Many of these poems were deeply uncomfortable to read because of the way in which—in my opinion and in my experience of reading it—it makes a mockery of Jewish people…in thought, in action, and in word.
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February 23, 2016In the poetry collection Tradition, the majority of Daniel Khalastchi's verse exists in an overwhelmingly surreal world of emotion, both (and occasionally simultaneously) subdued and exacerbated to the breaking point of reality itself. Khalastchi's imagery is halting yet somehow familiar, even when at it's most bizarre or disturbing. Selections throughout this collection teeter back and forth between humorous and solemn, from the ongoing adventures of a man and his conversion Rabbi, to the journey of a Jewish Iraqi refugee, pulling the reader continually deeper into the unavoidable (yet compelling and often essential) absurdities of life, love, religion, war, prejudice, and yes, tradition. Personal favorites in this collection are the reoccurring conversion exercises of the narrator and his Rabbi, and The Investment of Personal Investment, a mostly epistolary examination of holocaust revisionism.
October 3, 2015
These are odd, fascinating poems, often playful, but also intense. There is some raw imagery and plenty of wackiness.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews