High Desert

André Naffis-Sahely is a poet, editor and translator whose many publications include two collections, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), and a pamphlet, The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He edited The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (2020) and is editor of Poetry London. He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Alessandro Spina, Abdellatif Laâbi, Frankétienne, Ribka Sibhatu and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Several of these titles were selected as 'books of the year' by NPR, The Guardian and Financial Times. He grew up in Abu Dhabi, but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother. He has taught at Whittier College, Occidental College, and University of California, Los Angeles, where he was the Author in Residence. He is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Manchester Writing School in the UK, and a Lecturer at University of California, Davis in the US.

• I: PEREGRINATIONS11 The Last Communist13 The Other Side of Nowhere15 Folie à trois16 Nova Atlantis17 Spaghetti Westerns19 Montricher20 Young Romantics21 Chittagong22 Ierapetra23 The Train to St Petersburg25 Ode to the Errant KingII: THE CITY OF ANGELS29 Welcome to America30 The Year of One Thousand Fires32 Maybe The People Don’t Want to Live and Let Live34 The Bond36 El Molino Viejo38 RancherosIII: HIGH DESERT43 Roadrunners45 At the Graves of Labour’s Fallen47 [IWW leaflet, 1919]48 Spanish Flu49 Memorial Day50 The Great Molasses Disaster51 Down to Tucson52 High DesertIV: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE WEST57 Pablo Tac58 Mary Ellen Pleasant59 Article Nineteen60 Denis Kearney61 Wong Chin Foo62 Ricardo Flores Magón63 Louise Bryant64 Buck Colbert Franklin65 Art Shields66 George S. Patton67 John Samuelson68 Muriel Rukeyser69 Richard M. NixonV: CODA73 Tule Fog79 Notes

Naffis-Sahely’s desert is a space for reckoning. Not many poets have the courage to begin a book with a poem titled ‘The Last Communist’, in praise of a wounded and much-needed, though endangered species of thinker and doer in these acquisitive times. He reminds us of the work that poetry can do when properly deployed.