Saba Keramati writes about the hopes, dreams, characteristics, and experiences that form the self but that also stir up more mysteries in her new poetry collection, Self-Mythology. 

Keramati, born in America, writes from the perspective of being an only child of political refugees, her Chinese mother and Iranian father. Her poems probe how holding many identities results in feeling not fully one of them. The first poem, “THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO SAY THIS,” conveys the pang of these distinctions: “I have to write this poem in English / I do not speak my mother’s language / I do not speak my father’s language / I am not grateful for this country.” These circumstances and the desire to claim an identity, while at the same time chafing against the divisions of self, set the foundation for the collection that asks, “Who am I being today? / … / You’ll always be wrong, and I’ll always be / here, chameleoning myself / with every shift of the light.” 

Self-Mythology is forthright about its focus on the poet, but the poems also look outward. A series of centos, poems with all their lines borrowed from others, are sprinkled throughout the book, and each is called “Cento for Loneliness & Writer’s Block & the Fear of Never Being Enough, Despite Being Surrounded by Asian American Poets.” The third such poem contains lines like “I hold things I cannot say in my mouth—” and “There is mythology planted in my mouth which is like sin. / I cannot help but know the words.” In addition to these recurring centos, poems also reflect on attempts to learn a language, miscarriage, what it is like to be in a relationship, fire season in California, social media, astrology, and 9/11. 

Moments of revelation emerge in Self-Mythology. In “Chimera,” the speaker listens to the radio and hears lyrics conveying a thought that had earlier seemed original to the poet: 

But here it is, clear over the airwaves: my own thoughts in someone else’s mouth. So what’s left? I admit I am interested in my own thinking, obsessed with discovery and answers because: how devastating to be wrong about who you are. Did god give us all the same questions?

We may be more connected than we know. 

The flip side of those connections may be feeling removed: “This waning moon, its insides / full of goddesses and heartbreak, lore / I’ve learned from history books / and not my own blood.” This relationship to the poet’s heritage exacerbates the singularity that the poet feels as an “egotistical only child / lone plane in a cloudless sky / caged dog / unfinished map of a woman / blurred story.” Since there are no other witnesses who possesses the same identity, “My whole life I have been looking for someone to corroborate my own existence.” Yet, as the book goes on, we reach a poem titled the same as the collection, “Self-Mythology,” which asks, “What forgiveness is necessary, / for someone doing their best?” The question may also be the answer. 

Keramati earned her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Michigan and MFA at the University of California, Davis. She lives in Dearborn. Keramati will read with poets Jordan Windholz and Caitlin Cowan at Literati Bookstore on Thursday, November 7, at 6:30 pm.

I interviewed Keramati ahead of her local event. 

Q: When did you begin writing poems? 

A: My father is a short-story writer and I think of my mother as a wonderful diarist, so writing and storytelling have always been a large part of my life. I know that I certainly wrote poetry as a child, and my mother even printed out one of the first poems I wrote and framed it. I also have a distinct memory of a time when my grandmother was living with my family, which meant I had to share a bedroom with my parents, and writing a poem about a tiger in my head. I was terrified to lose it and so I woke up my mother in the middle of the night to ask if I could turn on the light and write the poem down. I am very lucky that my parents fostered such a love for language in my life from a young age, and so I credit my journey with poetry to them. 

Q: How did your Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at the University of Michigan influence your writing path? 

A: I knew pretty much immediately I wanted to be an English major when I went to college. I really do have a love for literature and theory that can’t be sated. One of my very first classes at U-M was a first-year seminar on confessional poetry, and I met some dear friends in the class who also loved writing poetry in addition to studying it. Although it felt like somewhat of a hobby, it took me a couple years to muster up the courage to show my writing to others, and it was not until my junior year that I signed up to take a workshop course. 

At this point, I thought perhaps I’d be a fiction writer. After all, most of what I’d studied was long-form narrative, and a small part of me wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps. But at the University of Michigan, the introductory creative writing class is multigenre, so I was required to write poetry. As I wrote fiction and poetry in tandem, I realized that not only was I much better at poetry, I actually enjoyed it much more. After that course, I took a more advanced creative writing workshop that was only poetry with Cody Walker, to whom I credit a great deal of my foundational knowledge in the craft.  

Q: Your new poetry collection, Self-Mythology, “explores multiraciality” and “considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.” The book’s acknowledgements say that it was first conceived at UC Davis. How did you conceive of this book? 

A: It might be more honest to say that Self-Mythology has been in conception for almost my whole life. But of course, I needed two years of fully funded study in order to bring it to fruition. As a child who devoured books and movies and all kinds of narratives, I was always searching for characters that reflected myself back to me, looking for someone to relate to. As Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must write it.” I took that to heart. Self-Mythology is a deeply personal book, which isn’t to say that everything written in it is factual, but it does all stem from personal experience. So I suppose the conception of this book has really just been my own living, my own understanding of myself and my place in the world. 

Q: Self-Mythology was a finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and selected by Patricia Smith, who wrote a preface to the book and describes your poems as containing “revelation, undaunted soul-searching, and crisp, deliberate lyric.” How did you react when you learned that you were a finalist for this prize? 

A: With great joy and almost disbelief. I thought maybe I had dreamt the phone call from Patricia Smith. She is one of our greatest living writers, and her writing has been a source of inspiration and a guiding light in my own journey. I think I’ll be riding the high of saying Patricia Smith picked my book for a lifetime. 

Q: You mentioned the seminar on confessional poetry that you took. The description of your writing on your website says, “I tend to start my work through the confessional mode, and work to widen my speaker’s gaze to capture her political and cultural landscape in addition to her own reflection.” Tell us more about this confessional mode and how it works in Self-Mythology. What is your relationship with the speaker of your poems? 

A: I rarely talk about this publicly, but I spent a lot of my youth acting in the theater. I think of the speaker of Self-Mythology the same way I thought of characters I played onstage: I am her but she is not me. 

It’s close to embodying a character. As an actor, I would be simultaneously bringing a character to life and putting bits of myself into the role. The lines get easily blurred, not during the performance itself, but in the creation of the character. For example, I’d say things like “when I walk downstage” as opposed to “when [character] walks downstage.” It would be wrong to say “the character is the actor” but the actor can be the character. 

I like Melissa Febos’s assertion that the binary between the “personal” and the “intellectual” is a false one. People of marginalized identities have often been told our stories are not worthy of intellectualism or publication. I’m OK with calling myself a confessional poet because I like to expand the possibilities of that word. 

Q: A poem titled “Self-Mythology” has the same title as the collection and appears as the sixth to last poem, rather than at the beginning. Do you think the book builds toward this poem? How so?  

A: I hope it does! It was intentional to put it toward the end. My ideal reading of it would have the reader consider what a “self-mythology” is at all, how it might differ from an autobiography or memoir, and maybe to consider their own self-mythology. Having the title poem toward the end also felt like, “Here, you’ve been interpreting the idea for almost the whole book now, let me tell you what I think of it.”

Q: On the topic of reading, you edit a journal. What does your work as the poetry editor for Sundog Lit involve? What have you learned about poetry from serving in this role? 

A: I read submissions alongside the talented poets Alyssa Froehling and Anthony Thomas Lombardi. We three read all the hundreds of submissions that come through and narrow it down to a maximum of 10 poets per issue. There are usually many more than 10 fantastic poems that we get to read and so we take on the task of grouping 10 poems together that also feel cohesive or thematically tied. 

I’ve learned that what Emily Dickinson said is true: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” When my editors and I are down to the last batch of great poems and we have to make difficult decisions, after we have gone back and forth articulating what elements of craft we admire in each poem, it comes down to a feeling. 

Q: What have you read recently that you are excited about? 

A: Some of my favorite poetry books from the last year or so have been Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali, Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson, The Lengest Neoi by Stephanie Choi, Portal by Tracy Fuad, How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters by Saúl Hernández, and Ward Toward by Cindy Juyoung Ok. I love reading books that teach me new tricks with language and I feel like these ones did that. 

I also need to shout out Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha and […] by Fady Joudah which are brand new books that feel critical in this time of confronting our own humanity. 

Q: What is next for you and your writing? 

A: I’m figuring that out, and I’m OK with that! I have a few friends with whom I exchange poems with back and forth on a schedule—we don’t necessarily provide feedback to each other on the work but we help keep each other writing. So as I write on a schedule, there are some days when a poem comes naturally to me and some when I just have to start writing about what happened to me that day. What I’m working on is not toward a project, but a practice. I’m still celebrating my first book and experiencing all kinds of things for the first time. It’s been a lovely experience that I intend to focus on and fully experience. 

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.

Saba Keramati will read with poets Jordan Windholz and Caitlin Cowan at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor, on Thursday, November 7, at 6:30 pm.