One Thousand Ghosts in This Feast by Sahar Khraibani

Sahar Khraibani’s ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST contends with desire, grief, and language as sites of injury and release. Written over a period of three days—amid ongoing genocide, land seizure, and displacement—the long poem counters logics of possession with those of relation. Khraibani’s all caps, first-person address impels the poem forward, centering intertextuality as a force through which spectral presences shine through.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sahar Khraibani is a writer and artist whose work has been presented with Montez Press, The Brooklyn Rail, Magnum Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Project, and Hyperallergicamong others. Sahar is a recipient of the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship at The Poetry Project, a MacDowell Fellowship, and is a 2024 artist in residence at Mass MoCA. Sahar teaches at Pratt Institute and is a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Their first book is forthcoming from 1080Press.

PRAISE

ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST lays bare the “SENSELESS DECAY” potentiated by empire’s relentless categorization, containment, and calculated death delivery. Khraibani’s debut chapbook collapses the imposed and perceived distance written by borders, disrupts anticipated colonial language logics, and bursts “INTO THE MADNESS OF THE ORGY” with queer interference reverberating in all directions. From the soil, from the graveyard, from the dancefloor, from their favorite spot on the eroding waterfront, Sahar broadcasts, IN ALL CAPS, “THE UNNAMEABLE TRUTH.” —Andrea Abi-Karam