The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life

(Paperback)

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Arresting reports of hardship, hope, 21st-century exile and the open road from a debut poet who has known them all Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from the 'disposable cities' composed of shanty towns and rough encampments which spring up wherever new resources are discovered to present-day London and North America, Andre Naffis-Sahely's bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them- travellers, labourers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. This is poetry as reportage, as much an act of memory as of sinuous, clear-eyed vision. As this arresting new poet has remarked elsewhere- 'I don't like poems that invent memories; I have enough of my own.'

Author Bio

Andre Naffis-Sahely was born in Venice in 1985 to an Iranian father and an Italian mother, but raised in Abu Dhabi. His poetry has been featured in Ambit, Arete, The Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt), New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015), PN Review and Swimmers, among others, and his nonfiction writing has appeared in such publications as the Economist, The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman and The White Review. He has been awarded fellowships from bodies including MacDowell Colony and Dar al-Ma'm n. He is also a literary translator from the Italian and the French; his Selected Poems of Abdellatif La bi, winner of a PEN Translates award, was published by Carcanet in 2016.