Poems that imagine Persian and Iranian American lives.
In Deep Are These Distances Between Us, Susan Atefat-Peckham troubles
preconceptions of nationhood and fixed systems of power by bringing the
reader into the Iranian American home, offering glimpses of familial
love and intimacy. Atefat-Peckham reaches for a network of care--the
foundations of which are located in the ability of these poems to evoke
the rich landscape of Iranian American lives. Articulating a
spirituality that has no spatial or temporal boundaries, one which
travels effortlessly between life and death, this collection is a
treatise on the empathy we need now more than ever.
An up-and-coming poet who died just four years after winning the
National Poetry Series Award in 2000, Susan Atefat-Peckham was deeply
concerned by the Islamophobic "Axis of Evil" rhetoric deployed after
9/11 and was skeptical of attempts by the United States to "democratize"
the Middle East. Representing the lives of immigrants in the United
States and Persians in Iran, as well as the distance that separates
their experiences and the love that binds them together, Atefat-Peckham
brings an important voice to that conflict--one of the family and the
home, where glimpses of intimacy and care rival imperial oppression.
