Poem Reading: "The Capacity for Happiness Despite Visual Evidence is Great" by Nathalie Khankan

An in accompaniment, here is Hilary Plum’s review in the Cleveland Review of Books (I admit, a favorite of mine):

Seeking fertility treatment, the self is in a state of profound need and transformative possibility, of desperation and choice, privileged to be subjected to medical regimes, precarious and generative. In this state, the poet attends to and appreciates “little justices” and forms of “tiny goodness”: the goodness and justice of her child’s birth, of poetry as testament to everyday life, “a little justice: this chirpy printed sound when i leave the library with kifah | every day a tiny goodness aggregates.”

This “little” quality isn’t minor, just as the “quiet” of the book’s title is essential to its “riot” (a wink, too, to the metal band of this name). I want to say Khankan’s style offers the feeling of thinking, a quality I love. This quality exists in the rich interstices of documentary poetry: when we readers feel the writer’s subjectivity encountering the stuff of history, the writer’s vulnerability in this encounter lent to us in turn. quiet orient riot is conversant with recent documentary poetics, though it looks to the close feminist work of a diary more than that of a public archive.

The poem "The Capacity for Happiness Despite Visual Evidence is Great" by Nathalie Khankan from Quiet Orient Riot.

You can purchase Khankan’s collection Quiet Orient Riot here.