Additional information
by Darius Atefat-Peckham (Author)
Named one of the "Best Books of 2024" by the New York Public Library, Book of Kin draws on the poet's Iranian heritage to process life-altering loss and grief.
Darius Atefat-Peckham's debut poetry collection follows a boy's coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead.
Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother's poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one's beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory "like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue."
Author Biography
Darius Atefat-Peckham grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, attended Interlochen Arts Academy, and received his BA in English and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard. His work has appeared in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, The Journal, Rattle, and elsewhere. He's been included in many anthologies, including My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). In 2018, the Library of Congress selected him as a National Student Poet. Atefat-Peckham is also the author of the chapbook, How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens Press), and editor of his mother's, Susan Atefat-Peckham's, posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press). He's currently a Poetry Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.
