Description

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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.

About the Author

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Susan Atefat-Peckham (1970–­­­­2004) was born as a first-generation American to Iranian parents and lived most of her life in Switzerland and the United States. She was the author of the poetry collection That Kind of Sleep and editor of the anthology of Middle Eastern writing, Talking Through the Door. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Borderlands, Prairie Schooner, International Poetry Review, Texas Review, Puerto Del Sol, Southern Poetry Review, and Northwest Review.

Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian American poet and essayist. His work has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, Indiana Review, and in the anthology My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora. He is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems. Atefat-Peckham lives in Huntington, West Virginia.

Praise For…

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“It is natural that under the words of poems like these, a geography of forms. Transnational, existing between countries and cultures, the poems of Susan Atefat-Peckham were part of the charting of a unique landscape. Like the poems of Meena Alexander, Shreela Ray, Reetika Vazirani, and Agha Shahid Ali, her poems have languages, locales, food, and fabrics fully other than the familiar material of American poetry. We have been waiting a long time for new poems from Susie, and here they are, found in files by her son, another poet of life and the mind. Rumi taught us that every poem must be followed by silence. We must listen carefully to the words we have been given. We are not bereft. This is a cartography of love and wonder. Cardinals, cardinals everywhere.”
— Kazim Ali, author of 'The Voice of Sheila Chandra'

“These poems burst from ‘the deep dark black mouth of memory’ where Atefat-Peckham navigates borders of existence and effectively sings herself back into this world. ‘Nothing dies in places we’ve left behind,’ she writes, then lifts up the moon at her feet and gives it ‘back to the empty sky.’”
— Sholeh Wolpé, author of 'Abacus of Loss'

“I first met Susan Atefat-Peckham through her poems—a kindred spirit navigating the spaces between. I wrote to her and our correspondence was one of a shared searching. When I learned of her death, I reached out to Joel Peckham, her husband, asking him to lend me some of her poems for the anthology, Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, which he generously offered and which opened each section of that book. How beautiful, more than sixteen years later, to see a whole collection of her work tended and lovingly brought into the world by her young poet-son, Darius . . . and to ‘think of what it means to be left behind, think of the scream, so loud it comes out in silent bowls shimmering with the hands of those who survive.’ This collection is a gift. These poems, ‘quiet with negotiation’ and a ‘shimmering’ connect the deep ‘distances between us.’”
— Persis Karim, poet and editor

"Darius Atefat-Peckham’s mother, Iranian American poet Susan Atefat-Peckham, died in a car accident when he was three years old. He brings us her second collection, Deep Are These Distances between Us. . . These elegiac poems reverberate with life, a reminder that the poet lives on through her work. . . ."
— Harriet Books

"The distances between Susan Atefat-Peckham and us may be great, yet hers is unmistakably a poetry for our perilous times. Susan Atefat-Peckham is 'still / in the universe.' She lives on via her poetry, which provides readers with a 'place of repeated / comfort where even scars will brighten.'"
— NewPages

"It is the aliveness of her poems, the voice speaking from and reaching across the distance, that gives us Susan Atefat-Peckham’s poetic vision made anew even in her bodily absence. And all the more sweet and tender it is because it is enabled by the mystery and beauty of her son’s poetic vision to make her alive again for us."
— World Literature Today