In his debut collection, Book of Kin, Darius Atefat-Peckham states: “I want / To see what, at the tongue of a cracked bell, survives.” Atefat-Peckham is a poet deeply attuned to the cracks in the bell of language. To the “portholes,” as he refers to them, the little openings between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. The poems in Book of Kin make these fissures, these gashes ripped open, ring clear with song.
With his ears held to the bell, hearts of his ancestors hanging heavy in the rungs of his body, Atefat-Peckham asks, in his poem “They Wake Me:” “How many beloveds in me will I survive?” Atefat-Peckham typed out and edited his mother Susan Atefat-Peckham’s manuscript Deep Are These Distances Between Us, which was published posthumously. I imagine his fingers thrumming with her words, alive. An open dialogue between the two of them.
Poetry fosters not only a dialogue between the poet and the reader, but also a dialogue between the poet and the fragments of themselves that have chipped from their fatigued bodies. Across the three sections that make up the tapestry of Book of Kin—“The First Sound,” “Book of Kin,” and “The Outer Reaches”—Atefat-Peckham reconstructs, heals, and breathes new life into what was presumed to be lost. Book of Kin is a collection that reincarnates, that “drift[s] in the outer reaches,” that stretches back into the gushy tenderness of the past and the liminal space where it fuses with the present.
Reading Book of Kin, I am reminded of why I write in the first place: to make what is unknown tangible, to reach out and touch loved ones who have passed on into a place where they are no longer seen, but felt and heard. The poems in Atefat-Peckham’s collection act as arms wrapping around the walls of the surreal, dipping into the deep cavities of the subconscious. Book of Kin is populated by many souls, the speaker’s “ears carry[ing] [their] beating / heart[s] like a breath,” these “soul[s] sat on [his] lips.” I believe that to be a good poet is to articulate the human experience, but to be a great poet is to wear it—Atefat-Peckham slips into the suit of the human experience with such ease that each leap feels both inevitable and surprising. With each line, a feeling of free falling and suspension.
Influenced by a wide array of poets from Rumi to Solmaz Sharif to Jorie Graham to Ross Gay, Atefat-Peckham’s work encapsulates the richness of his Iranian heritage, the ever-changing, shapeshifting nature of grief, its perpetual rawness as it’s “groom[ed]… like a pig for the fair,” and the immense joy and gratitude he holds for his loved ones, despite the loss he carries. In his poem “Once Mourned,” which is simultaneously humorous and prophetic, Atefat-Peckham states:
Your mother once
snuck her pet gerbil through
like a fugitive tucked in the barrel
of a toilet paper roll. All that,
just so the secret body
could die in the strong maw
of her husband’s boyhood
dog. The natural order
of things. What the crow does
on the side of the hot dirt road
is a kindness. To untie a body
from itself, a kindness,
though a story
always comes knocking
to be let back in its shell.
With his distinct, attentive voice, or, as he states in his poem “The Turkish Coffee Lady,” his “face that opens easily, like a flower, like a boy calling after / a skinned knee in so many languages, mouth warm and worn with Mother,” there is no thing that Atefat-Peckham cannot inhabit—the crow, the innumerable “shade[s] of mother[s],” the deep-sea diver, “mystic / astronaut pondering / pestle of chin / in [their] palm—stars / plunking against the hollow / of [their] helmet.” This shapeshifting that Atefat-Peckham undergoes is a vehicle of empathy, but there is also great power that exists within it. To see the “unty[ing] of bodies from [themselves]” as a kindness, to transform pain and suffering into a kindness, is to hold great strength.
This strength is evident in the muscularity of Atefat-Peckham’s lines, the palpable restraint in where they are broken and folded into one another: “All that, / just so the secret body / could die in the strong maw / of her husband’s boyhood / dog.” Reading these lines and the silences that occupy the space between them, questions of fragility and mortality bubble to the surface. How fragile is this life? What does it mean for a body to die in the maw of boyhood? In Book of Kin, the theme of boyhood is an animal crouched in the folds of language.
When one version of the self dies, it is mourned, and another is reborn. Atefat-Peckham’s poems act as both mourning rituals and hymns. There is a spiritual sense I feel as I flip through the pages of Book of Kin. Here, the reader does not stand in as an onlooker, but rather, is invited to be an active participant in the intimate and ongoing conversation between the spiritual world and the physical world. What we define as immaterial and what we define as physical is complicated and interrogated. The physical is elevated to the divine. Atefat-Peckham creates a space within his poems for us, as readers, to pray. In his poem “Learning to Pray”—an homage to his Bibi, his grandparents, and all things holy—he states:
I’ve never found them bent to Mecca
or to anything—Bibi, halving fruit, saying
she doesn’t need some compass to show her
which direction faces home; my mother
and brother are every direction and no direction
at once. She asks me if I understood. You
understood? And the world slows. And I am
the old man who often thrusts his furious
head through the shutter of my face. My chin
tilts heavy on my chest, my body whirling
without ever leaving my mat. I listen for it.
Atefat-Peckham is a poet who listens intently to the wingbeats of the sublime. He embodies “the patient stone [who] listens. Absorbs / the sorrows of those who confide in it.”
Similar to his Bibi, he does not need a compass to show him which direction his beloveds are. Across the poems in Book of Kin, he shows us that our beloveds are everywhere and nowhere at once, and that we can find peace within them, despite the all-encompassing temperament of grief. He teaches us how to wear our loved ones, how to come skin to skin with the celestial.
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