André Naffis-Sahely Livres

While half the world swept west, we trickled eastward, one by one, single- file, like fugitives. Next stop: Abu Dhabi, where my father had a job, and money, for the first time in years . . . Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from present-day London to North America, André Naffis-Sahely's bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: labourers, travellers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. 'Naffis-Sahely's poems usher the reader in to a world of reversals and risk . . . His narratives hold memory to account' DAVID HARSENT

High Desert is a psychedelic journal of end-times and ode to the American Southwest. Exploring such key events as the First Red Scare, the Tulsa Race Massacre and the West Coast's wildfire epidemic, Naffis-Sahely's reflections on class, race, and nationalism chart the region's hidden histories from the Spanish Colonial Era to the recent pandemic.