Book Review
At night when I rock my nearly two-year-old daughter to sleep, she often calls out my name shortly before drifting off. “Ammi?” she asks, as though to confirm I’m still there. And I answer her in the language of my parents, in the language I speak with the vocabulary of a 4th grader; I tell her, “Ammi’s right here. Ammi is always with you.”
It’s a promise I make full well knowing that it is not one I am actually in control of. And it’s the promise I found myself thinking about again and again as I read Darius Atefat-Peckham’s poetry collection, Book of Kin, released by Autumn House Press in fall, 2024.
In “Here’s a Love Poem to the Garden Snail,” Atefat-Peckham writes, “Can a person be a person without memories?” This is but one of many questions about the legacies and layers of grief that sit at the core of this collection. His poems explore the grief that accompanies losing a mother and brother early in childhood; the cultural bereavement that comes from being unable to fully access the country, the culture, the language of his mother’s family. But alongside that grief, there is this clarion call to love, to holding those still here with a kind of tenderness.
I knew before reading that I couldn’t review this book through the lens of a poet. That while I appreciate poetry, commentary on form or style is not a skill I possess.
I thought I would read through the lens of neighbor. I grew up just 40 miles down I-64 from Atefat-Peckham, and imagined there might be shared space between Iranian-Appalachian and Indian-Appalachian existence, between belonging and unbelonging in Appalachia.
I did not know that I was going to read this collection through the lens of mother. Did not know that it would show me all the ways in which mother and child’s identities are intertwined, shape one another, even if that shape is created by absence.
This fall, my partner Laura and I both transitioned to new jobs. Our daughter Kahani started daycare. The three of us all got COVID, one after the other after the other. Parenting has required a kind of relentless presence that exhausts me. Leaves no room for writing, no room for self. I attend to my job’s needs, to my child’s needs, or I am asleep. But my child doesn’t sleep, so mainly I just attend.
Which makes reading the following lines in Atefat-Peckham’s poem “Mother,” land in an entirely different way than it might have before becoming a parent: “If you long for time enough, absence becomes a kind of presence. Distance taut as a line between us. No cord is broken.”
Book of Kin is the first book that I’ve read through this mothering lens. The first book that’s caused me to consider the way that botha mother’s presence, and her absence, can shape a child—the first book that sits at the same intersection of deep grief and deep joy that I find myself at so often in these early years of parenting.
I find it impossible not to read these words through the lens of my relationship with my own child, through a kind of anticipatory grief whose arrival I can’t foresee, yet know will come to pass. Because as relentless as this present is, I know that it is fleeting, at best. That presence is always ultimately followed by absence.
Book of Kin is the first book that I’ve read through this mothering lens. The first book that’s caused me to consider the way that both a mother’s presence, and her absence, can shape a child—the first book that sits at the same intersection of deep grief and deep joy that I find myself at so often in these early years of parenting.
Time and time again while reading Book of Kin, I was stopped by the potency of Atefat-Peckham’s words, by his ability to arrest me with a question, as in “Heathcliffs,” where he writes, “If she was too good for this world, as they say, what does that make me, still standing here, gathering myself at the gate?” I was stopped by his ability to challenge me to live more intentionally, with more clarity about how I spend my time, as in “Of Blueberries,” when he writes, “I am always thinking. There is only so much life to live. Only so much time under ideal conditions. So much. Only so much.” This is not a collection that you will consume quickly. Each poem requires its own time—time to appreciate the beauty of the language, yes, but also time to consider the ways in which grief and joy live beside and within each of us.
My therapist says that healthy attachment between parent and child is not reflected in a relationship where there is never conflict or tension or separation. She says instead that healthy attachment is marked by the cycle of rupture and repair. That there will be breaks, there will be separations. We will, at times, cause one another harm. But that the goal isn’t to avoid rupture; the goal is to consistently seek to repair, to come back to one another.
I think in some ways, Book of Kin is a collection that seeks to repair from the most profound rupture that can happen to the parent-child relationship. Atefat-Peckham shows us that repair is found in both making space for the voices of those who’ve gone before us, and making visible the ways in which they continue to shape us. That repair comes from nurturing the relationships we have with those who are still here. Indeed, that words themselves can offer us a kind of repair.
Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003, and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place (WVU Press, 2022), has been called “A timely collection that begins to fill the gap in literature focused mainly on the white male experience” by Ms. Magazine, and “A graceful exploration of identity, community, and contradictions,” by Scalawag. The book was named Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, was one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in Boston with her partner, Laura, and her daughter, Kahani.