Book of Kin

Named one of the Best Books of 2024 by the New York Public Library,Book of Kin draws on the poets Iranian heritage to process life-altering loss and grief.Darius Atefat-Peckhams debut poetry collection follows a boys coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead.Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mothers poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward ones beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue.