Story of Your Obstinate Survival

In The Story of Your Obstinate Survival, Daniel Khalastchi boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms as a way of asking: In the face of incessant turmoil, how do we go on? This exhilarating and innovative book 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, pleasure and pain, to examine both calamities and the dogged persistence required to endure. On display throughout is Khalatschi’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”

“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

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 (winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry). His work has appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, The Believer Logger, Colorado Review, Granta, TheIowa Review, the Jewish Book Council’s Paper Brigade, and Best American Experimental Writing. He currently lives in Iowa City, where he directs the University of Iowa’s Magid Center for Writing. He is the cofounder and managing editor of Rescue Press.