We Were Promised Flying Cars

Author: Kareem Rahma

Publisher: Pioneer Works (2020)

The debut poetry collection from Arab-American poet Kareem Rahma―formerly of VICE and The New York Times―shows us the future in haiku. Simultaneously a hopeful prayer for change and direct warning to the reader, Rahma makes masterful work of the haiku form to build a very possible future world dominated by corporations, an earth depleted of natural resources, and humans turned into zombies, glued to their screens. The future that awaits us is not the one we’ve hoped for or what we were promised, but a terrible culmination of what we’ve done to ourselves. Elegant but caustically humorous, this prophetic vision can be returned to again and again, because even in the darkness, Rahma remains hopeful that we can still keep the promises we made in the past. Paired with Jean-Marc Côté’s nineteenth-century illustrations of an imagined year 2000, We Were Promised Flying Cars is not just for poetry and science fiction fans, but anyone interested in what tomorrow might look like.