Tradition

The wildly imaginative poems in Daniel Khalastchi’s Tradition bring to life a speaker struggling to find balance between familial pressure and personal identity, religious faith and recognition of the world’s calamities. An Iraqi Jewish American and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Khalastchi’s much-anticipated follow-up to his award-winning debut is a surreal cir de coeur—a darkly humorous wonderland too fantastical and fresh to be doubted.