Darius Atefat-Peckham: Three Poems

Darius Atefat-Peckham’s debut poetry collection, Book of Kin, follows a boy’s 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 mother’s poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin won the 2023 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, selected by January Gill O’Neil.

Darius Atefat-Peckham