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Andr 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 is a renowned translator, and several of his titles have been selected as Books of the Year by NPR, The Guardian and Financial Times.
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. -- Fred D'Aguiar André Naffis-Sahely’s High Desert radically presents an intensive record of capitalism’s complex forms of local and global enslavements, each poem skillfully and precisely formed, emotionally charged, and morally infused with an acute sense of justice. High Desert places Naffis-Sahely among our most indispensable poets, those who, throughout history, testify to the truths of poetry against the lies of violent, destructive, corrupt, oligarchic power. -- Lawrence Joseph * author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (FSG, 2020) * Naffis-Sahely’s poems usher the reader in to a world of reversals and risk... His narratives hold memory to account. -- David Harsent * on The Promised Land * I much admired André Naffis-Sahely’s sharp meditations on our vast but remarkably homogeneous global landscape. -- Pankaj Mishra * on The Promised Land *
