Heart Failed in the Back of a Taxi

Pedram Navab's Heart Failed in the Back of a Taxi explores the modern notion of loneliness and mourning through the lens of people and objects that have been cast aside as waste and forgotten. Whether the subject is a telephonic landline to the graves of two philosophers, a steam room in a fitness club that recalls the Holocaust, or trash in a Tokyo landfill that takes on a disfigured human form, the idea of abjectness begins to signify a new horror. Although, on the surface, this sense of forlornness signifies hopelessness, what emerges instead is a radical realization that this desolation can bear an uncanny strength. The detritus documented in these poems reveals a glimpse of a heartbreaking potentiality that is ultimately transforming.