Heart Failed in the Back of a Taxi

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Pedram Navab is a neurosomnologist, living in Los Angeles. He has been educated at Stanford and Brown. His first collection of poems and stories, Clean, was published in 2006. Ioana Urma illustrated the art for this text. She is an artist, illustrator, and architect with a diverse body of work rooted in the study of human perception, cognition, and physical experience. She holds degrees from M.I.T. and Cornell University.