Daniel Khalastchi – författare

Daniel Khalastchi's third collection provides an uncompromising exploration into the political and societal disturbances facing America today. Electioneering, lack of affordable health care, the increase in mass shootings, and the continued fight for equal rights are juxtaposed against an unlikely sense of hope and optimism. Lurking behind each page is the ever-present issue of immigration, with specific focus on the escape of the author's father from Iraq and the pressures linked to living as an Arab Jew in the middle of the United States.Through unnerving gallows humor and radical honesty, these poems redefine the American experience by asking the reader to consider what it means to live in the shadow of a perceived sense of freedom and to have faith when believing feels hopeless. Khalastchi's perspective as an Iraqi Jewish American brings sharp focus to the holistic uncertainties of religion, politics, assimilation, illness, love, and loss—with absurd, visceral, and wry acclaim. I type intothe internet your high schooland find rubble. Your daughterhas the flu. We are sickwith disappointment buteveryone is fine.—Excerpt from "First Generation: Our Escape"

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 downand bound the carnival carnivorous is glowing, amidway ways away alit and stilted by the night.—Excerpt from “Trying to I Can’t Hit Anything Yet the Bodies Pile Up”