High Desert

André Naffis-Sahely’s High Desert combines reportage and biography to interrogate intersections of identity, belonging, and borders. Poems written from Chittagong, Paris, Venice, and Sulphur Springs Valley, Arizona, reveal the horrors embedded in these cities’ histories. In addition to “church bombings, / race riots, Vietnam” Naffis-Sahely reaches farther back, in one poem referencing the fifth century Arabic poet Imruʾ al-Qays (purportedly poisoned by a Byzantine emperor), in another the legacy of a 221 BC emperor: “Shi Huang’s fantasy of a Godly Wall / proliferates across the planet.” 

The poems draw on historical documents like a 1919 Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago leaflet and California’s 1878 Second State Constitution, as well as Muriel Rukeyser’s FBI file. In addition, Naffis-Sahely weaves in personal stories of a racialized body in the United States. In “Welcome to America,” written as a long quote, presumably from a border security agent, we read: “if it was up to me, / I’d send you straight back.” And, in a nod to his native Italy, the poet recalls how “two cops in Catania / stung a sixteen-year-old boy from Darfur / with cattle-prods.”

While often moving, the catalogue of injustices presented in High Desert is so wide ranging that I struggled to feel grounded in any one place as the speaker flits from tragedy to tragedy in a kind of grim travel guide. This may, in fact, be the point. I took cold comfort in the “frozen prayer” of “Tule Fog,” in which the speaker observes: “no matter // how many miles I devoured between Tecate and Taos, / that fog never left me,” and the images unfurl: 

[…] What is fog? Fog is water
when it dreams of granite,
when it seeks the illusive
safety of rock, a hologram projected
by the dew. Fog is a phantom bred by fire,
it is the shape grief assumes […]

Through such gloom, the rootless speaker is searching for the good, and we are left to settle for hoping against hope:

[…] If happy countries exist,
I’ve yet to see one, and forty-seven
nations later, my idiot heart still races

at the sweet sound of wheels on the tracks […]