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 rithā 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 | Imagine | Been Science Fiction Always, Sho & Optic Subwoof

"These poems...will not let us forget each other or leave anyone behind. They are a call to remember our humanity in all its hurt, in all its sweetness, in all its anger and sorrow." -Ana-Maurine Lara, author of Kohnjehr Woman & Erzulie's Skirt

"Saleeby Savage confronts the most recent decade of atrocities and breaks open her own heart to ask what she-the mother, the wife, the grandchild of refugees, the poet-can do in the face of overwhelming helplessness and rage. Saleeby Savage reminds us . . . there's a word for hope in every language." -Armin Tolentino, author of We Meant To Bring It Home Alive

"With exhilarating lyric intensity, Savage's poems sing the horrors and pleasures of life in the 21st century." -Rob Schlegel, author of Childcare 

"At this moment when we are, as a nation, choosing how close to hold each other...Saleeby Savage reminds us that . . . destroying and re-claiming the world are two sides of the heart's fragile coin." -Kristin Berger, author of Echolocation & How Light Reaches Us

"This poet breathes the shards . . . into a fierce and irresistible music." -Alexis Lathem, author of Lambs in Winter & Alphabet of Bones