Nuclear Deal
In Nuclear Deal, Nilufar Karimi delves into Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from Iran’s Nuclear Deal. The poet attempts, as she puts it in “Collision Notes,” to write through the noise of the events that followed—including a nine-day blackout Iran imposed on its citizens in 2019 in response to growing protests—to “make a deal with that sound” through a kind of “mutual translation” of the noise of violence and destruction. But at times the collection feels too much like a project book in its deliberateness (the language of negotiation and dispute, the italicizations from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and I found myself jarred by the insistence of the book’s critique.
There is an increasing trend in poetry to interrogate U.S. imperialism and its bureaucratic and militarized violence. Sometimes, such works use state documents and treaties as primary source materials or employ complex erasures to translate unacknowledged oppressive structures. This work is deeply important. And yet, the most unforgettable lines in Nuclear Deal are those that ask what it is these kinds of poems can do, and how to translate pain into something more than a wound on the page.
“It is not as if I am not writing for pleasure,” says the speaker in a “Tale of King Raam.” Addressing a skeptical friend, the speaker insists she is “writing with King Raam,” who, she explains, she “met here in the writing.” Together, says the speaker, she and King Raam occupy an imaginary bakery in which they frost fake cakes with “frosting presidents, frosting celebrities.” I laughed aloud reading this poem, which demonstrates Karimi’s strengths: eccentricity, humor, and camaraderie with the dead, mythological, unreal, or non-human. After all, how does one write a book about a complex geopolitical tragedy? About a specific document that holds the lives of so many at stake? These destabilizations are best met, in my opinion, with an imagination able to pivot outside of the language of sovereignty and into the language of a parallel universe, dreamworld, and afterlife. Poetry collections such as Nuclear Deal are important because what they address is important, but still more important is how these poems defamiliarize what we think they are addressing.