Salim is a poetry collection about where we come from and the legacy we’re born to build. The collection rides from the streets of Baghdad to the sidewalks of Los Angeles, tracing one family's journey across generations and continents. These poetry pieces explore what it means to be caught between two worlds: the one you left and the one that doesn't quite feel like home.
Salim parallels the decaying state of a country that once promised hope with the conflicted mind of a thirty-year-old writer grappling with his own personal turmoils and relationship with the world around him. Salim is about family, building a new foundation to grow from, and the search for self.
From Iraq to America, from ancestral memory to the Hollywood dream, these poems detail the writer's path to understand his place in a modern wasteland, and his search for peace in a maddened world.
Salim is a poetry collection about where we come from and the legacy we’re born to build. The collection rides from the streets of Baghdad to the sidewalks of Los Angeles, tracing one family's journey across generations and continents. These poetry pieces explore what it means to be caught between two worlds: the one you left and the one that doesn't quite feel like home.
Salim parallels the decaying state of a country that once promised hope with the conflicted mind of a thirty-year-old writer grappling with his own personal turmoils and relationship with the world around him. Salim is about family, building a new foundation to grow from, and the search for self.
From Iraq to America, from ancestral memory to the Hollywood dream, these poems detail the writer's path to understand his place in a modern wasteland, and his search for peace in a maddened world.
I lay my head to rest and retreat from the world. Behind my eyelids hold the portal to a past life, freed from the restraints of time that held this corporeal form in place.
I sync my soul to vibrations that open the tunnel towards a prior era, a world that’s foreign to the realities of the present. Adjusting the continuum to tap into a sacred source I’ve never known, I’ve never seen.
Visions of palms and marshes. Scents of cardamom and rose.
I move within this realm to understand the past, chain linking every scene that unfolds through each year.
I see clearly under the melting sun of Baghdad, with the heartbeats of the past under my fingertips. The generations of my family line, flying over country lines. The wonders of another era with questions still unanswered.
I wish you would’ve spoken to me more about your past, back when you were a little boy. I’m relentless now, aching to place my perspective into your psyche. To sit behind your wise eyes and observe your world before I was born.
That’s where I want to reside, reclining back into your memories and all your unspoken words.
Anton told us upfront that he was going to take us on a journey from Iraq to Los Angeles as we traced members of his family across ‘generations and continents’. Salim by Dominic Anton is a short poetry collection that explores two worlds where neither feels quite like home. In the poems, he voiced himself, but there were also times when he presented the world through the eyes of his elders. I get the impression that Anton only briefly experienced Iraq, but that he left it behind when he was very young.
I wanted to dive into this book because I have a general love for books that come from, or are about that part of the world. I also had flashes of recognition of the emotions I felt reading The Beekeeper of Aleppo and wondered if this collection would touch my heart in similar ways. I won’t beat around the bush; I really enjoyed this collection. I found it deeply personal but extremely open.
The book has a raw layout. It includes family photos from childhoods, weddings, memorable moments. They begin in black and white, progress to sepia, and then we are privy to color photos. There are times when they are presented as though they are being placed in a scrapbook so they are not perfectly lined up, some sow signs of wear, and they are a mixture of sizes. Consequently, I felt like a trusted friend being given the key to the door. The photographs also maintained the momentum of moving through the different decades. The overall effect is less like reading a conventional poetry collection and more like watching a family documentary unfold through photographs and verse. I was entertained by the creativity whilst also learning about a new culture and displacement at the same time.
Images aside, the maturity of these poems are to be appreciated. At times they read like a personal journal arranged in stanzas of broken lines to create rhythms of sorts. At other times, there is some clever rhyming employed within those line breaks, as exemplified in ‘Wildfire’. I felt the collection was cohesive as it revisited themes of heritage, migration, memory and identity, which bound the poems together and left no doubts that this was a well-rounded, polished collection. I also enjoyed how descriptive they were. The reader is taken on a tour of their own sense. We see, hear, and breathe the environments that Anton displays. What makes this both possible and effortless is the accessibility of the writing. It isn’t overly complicated with symbolism and double meanings. What you read is what you get without diluting the emotion.
What I found most interesting was how the poems defied expectation. They were not a case of either mourning Iraq or celebrating America, there was a general sense of discomfort at being stuck between two worlds and what that meant for both the past, and the future. It also felt like an attempt to preserve family history before the memories are lost.
If I were to recommend this book, at the top of the list would be readers that enjoy memoirs, family history, and poetry deeply connected to personal identity. Outside of that, fellow immigrants and allies will also find the book interesting and enlightening. The only criticism I have is that there could have been more variation of tone. All the poems felt deep and heavy and it would have been nice to have some lighter moments intersperse them but overall, it was a solid 4 out of 5 stars read.