Daniel Khalastchi boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms. Exhilarating and innovative, The Story of Your Obstinate Survival collapses genre and upends narrative convention with dazzling wordplay and thrilling imagery. Inhabiting a world trapped somewhere between dreams and reality, these poems fuse the political and personal, public and private, pleasing and piquant, to examine both calamities and the dogged persistence required to endure. On display throughout is Khalastchi’s exceptional capacity for detail and specificity, filling up this world to the point of breaking but never beyond, insisting on survival despite it all.

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—and lives in Iowa City, where he directs the University of Iowa’s Magid Center for Writing.

Contents

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