André Naffis-Sahely at Manchester Poetry Library
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
André Naffis-Sahely will be launching his most recent collection of poems, High Desert, at Manchester Poetry Library with readings from the book and a discussion with author Adam O’Riordan, Reader at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.
High Desert is a psychedelic journal of end-times and an 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. The poems in High Desert also revel in their rootlessness, as the author shifts his gaze outside the US, travelling from Venice and Florence to Chittagong and St Petersburg, tackling our turbulent times and the depths of its problems in searing, extraordinary poems of witness and vision.
