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.
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Darius Atefat-Peckham
, Darius Atefat-Peckham is the author of Book of Kin, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize (October 2024) and editor of his mother’s, Susan Atefat-Peckham’s, posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press 2023). His work has recently... Read more
, Darius Atefat-Peckham is the author of Book of Kin, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize (October 2024) and editor of his mother’s, Susan Atefat-Peckham’s, posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press 2023). His work has recently appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, Rattle, The Journal, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. In 2018, he was selected by the Library of Congress as National Student Poet. Atefat-Peckham grew up in Huntington, West Virginia and earned a Bachelor of Arts in English at Harvard. He is currently a Poetry Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. Read less
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