The Story of Your Obstinate Survival (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

Praise for The Story of Your Obstinate Survival (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

“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

“It’s The Story of Your Obstinate Survival, and mondegreen, malaprop, misremembering member these casted lines even as these lines cast a motley populace: holler at me wayward new Senator, honeymooners of the lusophone, mid friend, X-ray techs, and expecting pessimists. Expecting textual comic strips? Natch. Still catch the catastrophes beneath the cackling, between ill chimes and rhymes, the jinglejangle Daniel Khalastchi entangles in his syntax; he sets the lexical to play with itself roughly; sees the Locked-Downers stuffed in meat lockers; proffers ruefully to the newly born/newly gone: ‘there is no use trying/to stop the wreckage.’ Heck, all that glass and metal really sounds pretty.”—Douglas Kearney

“The Story of Your Obstinate Survival lays out an uneasy dreamscape of middle-class, middle-aged life at what can feel like the end of a world. The immediate stuff and facts of that life—the roof, medication, cars, relationships, real estate agents, the occasional wild animal—all threaten to come apart in ways that feel as familiar as they do unreal or impossible. Through these strange scenes, Khalastchi rides sonic associations, hopes, regrets, histories, revealing an intelligent figure trying to puzzle out what it means to go on and finding little moments of humor along the way. This is a moving, compelling collection, a vital documentation of a life in uncertain times.”—Heather Christle

“When The Story of Your Obstinate Survival begins, the speaker—let’s say there’s just one speaker—of the poems has been dislocated from their body by an act perpetrated or instigated by a figure known only as the Senator, though it isn’t immediately apparent that the Senator is responsible. The rest of the book reads like the speaker’s attempt to sing their way back to oneness with their body, and though the attempt is colored by bewilderment, anger, and sorrow, it is as rich with music as any poetry being written today. The Story of Your Obstinate Survival is a triumph of song.”—Shane McCrae

“Despite the personal and collective turmoil that stand back of Daniel Khalastchi’s The Story of Your Obstinate Survival, the writing from poem to poem, line to line, is animated by linguistic joy and an almost madcap surrealism and humor that somehow manage to confront without prettifying or flinching from the nightmare of history, even while showing us how to maintain emotional and spiritual poise at the darkest of times.”—Alan Shapiro

“This genre-bending book overturns narrative conventions in pieces that question the line between public and private.”—Publishers Weekly Spring 2024 Adult Announcements