A Theory of Knots

These lyric, unsparing poems stitch together a story of identity, belonging, and dissolution.

A Theory of Knots explores the loops of how identity and belonging are constructed, broken, resurrected, and dissolved. In sections, knots weave DNA and cords, memory and mythology, home and tongue; they draw on desire, Zoroastrian rituals, tradition and transgression, and the legacies of womanhood, asking what connects us, and at what cost.

As layers of identity are examined, Pervin Saket's poems return to language: heirloom, hazard, half-truth. Soon enough, language is both subject and suspect; having exposed the artificial nature of our truths, the poems confront the artificial nature of language itself. At the end, poetry reaches the wilderness of earth, collapses upon itself, dissolving on the page—untangling the final knot.