We Were Promised Flying Cars is the debut poetry collection from Arab-American poet Kareem Rahma, formerly of VICE and The New York Times.
Showing us the future in haiku, the collection is simultaneously a hopeful prayer for change and direct warning to the reader. Rahma utilises 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.
The book is 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.
Pioneer Works, 128pp, 15cm x 12cm, illustrated hardback, 2025