R Rakhshani

These Days R Rakhshani

Publisher Marketing: The conception of literature as escape, but always as an escape across the horizon to a different world, a world that is anti-thetical to the human realm, yet filled with a nonhuman life, is at the heart of this Persian book of poetry. My path of flight is an open road, a long life-travel into the unknown, whose goal is merely the process of the journey. The open road is selfless yet not amorphous, purified both of merging and of self, and its mode of relation is that of sympathy, a "feeling with" that includes within it the sympathies of love and hate - in short, a general affectivity that pervades a process of open-ended movement. All these motifs - flight, the open-ended journey, nonhuman life, selfless identity, general affectivity - enter into characterization of writing poetry in this book. What does it mean to write poetry? To write poetry is to flee, is to betray, is to become, and so on - each infinitive signaling networks of concepts we have come upon before. To flee is to trace a line of flight, it is a line that converges on the vanishing point in perspectival representation, a line leading beyond the horizon. Writing poetry is to get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another life.