The Story of Your Obstinate Survival

Daniel Khalastchi is an Iraqi Jewish American, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is the author of three previous books of poetry-Manoleria, Tradition, and American Parables (winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry). His work has appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, The Believer Logger, Colorado Review, Granta, TheIowa Review, the Jewish Book Council's Paper Brigade, and Best American Experimental Writing. He currently lives in Iowa City, where he directs the University of Iowa's Magid Center for Writing. He is the cofounder and managing editor of Rescue Press.

BRIEF EXPERIMENT WITH EXPOSITION Representational Invention to Mask More Serious Emotional Concerns ELEVEN INCITING INCIDENTS Confounding Attempts to Explain the Mystery Among Us a Stomach As Yet You Left Addressing Headlights Spent in Actual Trapeze Dear : I Want to Be a Better Friend, I'm Sorry We Must Be Solidly Indemnified The Hysterical Likeness Refrigerator Hum Bitter and Bitten and There Is Nothing to See In Tennessee You Tell Me We Are Approximately Seasonal Girls Running in the Spring RISING ACTION AS COLLECTIVE MYTH Youth, and Other Misguided Diagnoses of a Failed Relationship All of Me Is Elegy, a House Pronounced as Sold Dead Tree in Stairwell On Viewing a Sympathetic Nazi Perseverance Tableau Faring Poorly in Water Turndown Service Dear : I Want to Be a Better Friend, I'm Sorry Gutter and Brain I Sleep the Sleep of Honeymooners Keeping Peace in Portugal Anything Could Be Back There Our Pregnant Racial Obesity Withering Frame Thirteen Hundred Miles from Our Mortgage We Are Running For You on Your Birthday NINE ADDITIONAL COMPLICATIONS Variations on a Large Historical Oversight A Body Book-Reviewed as Clinical, the Constituents Debate Lava by Staircase The Imminent Decline of Everything We've Understood to Be What Governs Our Privileged Daily Lives Dear : I Want to Be a Better Friend, I'm Sorry What Cheer A Contagious Age It's Been Evening All Day Long The Sea it Rises Steadily and Suddenly Arrives TOWARD A HIGH POINT, or ALL DOWNHILL Year-End Reconciliation Adjustment Dear : I Want to Be a Better Friend, I'm Sorry Oh, I Think About the Dead We Ought Not Want to See This but Can't Really Look Away Because the Night A Formidable Plan to Address the National Convention Dance Party for the End of the World An Inevitable Rescue Trying to I Can't Hit Anything Yet the Bodies Pile Up Outside the House You Summarize Relatively Direct Letter of Resignation A Stain on All Our Houses Postcard in Drawer Dayenu RESOLUTION More Bad News Notes Acknowledgments

"Like a new angel of history, The Story of Your Obstinate Survival arrives with its wings heavy with live fish and doorknobs, shovels and bone cake, faith and desire. Khalastchi has turned the poem into a long, beautiful wail, soft and brilliant enough for even Babel and Kafka and Singer to hear. It wouldn't surprise me to find out Khalastchi feeds each poem by hand, and brushes nightly their wings. With as much abandon as with hope, these poems sway on the edge of a miracle."-Sabrina Orah Mark