NEW SEPTEMBER 2025
“first you must destroy the world collects poetry of ‘hedonist reach’ and thirst, laid down in what the poet understands to be the too small fields of little deaths, where ‘flesh surrender as good/as any peace treaty’ won’t drown out the big deaths, those wars outside the poet’s windows and inside her own history. Just as firmly, she holds that people needed to make people before wars could take them, and so Saleeby Savage’s poems do 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 I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, Optic Subwoof, and Sho “Claudia Saleeby Savage's first you must destroy the world is raw grit and power. It is an awakening of our senses beyond the material world, a recollection of what it means to be human. Reading these poems I was left breathless and humbled at the many ramifications and repercussions of war. These poems will not let us forget family, place, or loss. They 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. Thank you Claudia for this collection—for reminding us we are not immune; for reminding us of what we pick up in the worlds left behind.” —Ana-Maurine Lara, author of Kohnjehr Woman and Erzulie's Skirt “In this unflinching collection, 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. She puts everything she has in these poems. Like a jazz virtuoso, she riffs urgently between authoritarian war, erotic joy, state-sponsored starvation, the dark ocean, and her grandmother’s plate of lamb and yogurt. In the face of relentless devastation, Saleeby Savage reminds us that poetry is the anti-weapon, that children are still playing on top of the rubble, and there’s a word for hope in every language.” —Armin Tolentino, author of We Meant to Bring it Home Alive “Born during the Syrian thirteen-year-long civil war and refugee crisis, the stunning poems collected in first you must destroy the world, fuse the personal and the political like no other poems I know. To say these are poems of empathy would not be quite right, because empathy does not go far enough. Not for the poet who insists on conjuring away maplines—between self and other, us and them, citizen and refugee, body and spirit—until they make new and dazzling patterns on the page. Not for the poet who, in conversation with her ancestral ghosts, can trace the twisting double helixes of ancestral lines until we have to ask, when did here become here? No matter how fractured and broken by violence or grief, this poet breathes the shards back to life and into a fierce and irresistible music. If you are feeling numbed by the daily horror of headlines, this book is the elixir that will quicken your deepest humanity.” —Alexis Lathem, author of Lambs in Winter and Alphabet of Bones “From the first poem of Claudia Saleeby Savage’s new book, first you must destroy the world, you are aiming for the last line—‘the poet takes whatever is left/and breathes it back alive.’ What is lost, and what must be recovered, sifts through the poet’s hands like water—family lineages salvaged from Syrian rubble and refuge rafts, including her own Sitti’s stories that survived the years: ‘Always a border somewhere & those intent on crossing./The streets heave iron. This place wants to send them back. She misses sand./She misses foam.’ This wide and sensual collection is a musical notation of erasure. Saleeby Savage conjures the sounds of missing in both empty swaths and staccato on the page—the symbols we are told stands in for the sound of a mother sshhing, or the sound a missile makes through the air on its way to its target: ‘tip your child’s head up/hope their hearts/turn to wonder=====’. Saleeby Savage brings her fully awake, desirous and protective self to each poem, accepting the weight of the task to tell any story of the unclaimed and the unnamed: ‘you will not/be just a/thumb drive./your husband’s comb. your daughter’s medicine. a drawing by your grandfather./a handful of dirt./a piece of Syria/hold it close.’” —Kristin Berger, author of Echolocation and How Light Reaches Us “Claudia Saleeby Savage's poems sing. They sing into the parched throat of a lover ‘to bring up the water of the other.’ They sing into sorrow because ‘Love is already too brief.’ They sing into the complexities of identity when the poet admits, ‘I am uncomfortable with my own face. My rage sparks daily.’ Perhaps most importantly, these poems sing across borders because there is ‘Always a border somewhere & those intent on crossing.’ With exhilarating lyric intensity, Savage's poems sing the horrors and pleasures of life in the 21st century.” —Rob Schlegel, author of Childcare 65 pages | A5 5.83 x 8.27 in. | 2025 ISBN-13: 978-1-958600-13-9 (paperback) $15 |
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Claudia Saleeby Savage is an Arab American poet, essayist, and mama with Multiple Sclerosis whose writing and performance explores displacement and the landscape of the body and has been featured in print, on stage, and in galleries throughout the country. She is the author of first you must destroy the world (First Matter Press, fall 2025), metal used for beauty alone (from The Poetry Box for print + voice), Bruising Continents (Spuyten Duyvil), and The Last One Eaten: A Maligned Vegetable's History, with recent print work in Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, About Place, and River Teeth. A Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Poets nominee, Saleeby Savage has received support from many organizations including RACC, Ucross, Jentel, The Black Earth Institute (as an emeritus fellow), MARS, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She creates alone and with her music-text duo Thick In The Throat Honey (they were 2019 semi-finalists for a Creative Capital award on the Syrian refugee crisis). She works in the field of renewable energy and lives with her experimental musician husband, daughter, and vocal cat in the Pacific Northwest.