first you must destroy the world

first you must destroy the world is a searing poetic reckoning, where ancestral memory and political rupture converge in forms that gleam and stagger. Claudia Saleeby Savage draws from Arab poetics, erasure, and theatrical invocation to confront war, exile, motherhood, and erotic survival. These poems speak through rith¿ and ghazal, through absences carved by grief, and densities charged with longing. The story rings clear but never sacrifices the mysticism that lets poetry sing. In a voice both intimate and immense, Saleeby Savage rebuilds a war-torn and tender lyric terrain where personal and collective losses collide-and something sacred floats in the wreckage. "first you must destroy the world collects poetry of 'hedonist reach' and thirst, laid down in what the poet understands . . . do[es] not keep time with Eros despite Ares, rather as anti-weapon, as a frequent condition of life, as one means 'to bring up the water of the other.' Tears, here, are for loss of life, memory, and connection, for Syria, for touch that could be sensual but is instead brutal. This collection grips that tension in remarkable lines of musicality and invention, frank desire, with imagery that stuns and dazzles." -Douglas Kearney, author of