In The Story of Your Obstinate Survival, Daniel Khalastchi boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms as a way of asking: In the face of incessant turmoil, how do we go on? This exhilarating and innovative book 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, pleasure and pain, to examine both calamities and the dogged persistence required to endure. On display throughout is Khalatschi’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.

Crowds around the circus serve as means of an escape,
a legislative party bus of palliative care. There standing 
by the advent tent are penitential dentures, striking in 
their likeness to entire choking towns. Backed down
and bound the carnival carnivorous is glowing, a
midway ways away alit and stilted by the night.
—Excerpt from “Trying to I Can’t Hit Anything Yet the Bodies Pile Up”