Books

New York City, New Directions Publishing, 2022.

Farrokhzad, and icon and a rebel, is the pre-eminent woman poet of modern Iran. A major figure in world literature, she remains a beacon to artists, especially women and marginalized artists, who seek freedom in all its form. This selection gathers work from across Farrokhzad’s writing life, early to late, including the entirely of her posthumous book, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season.

New York City, New Directions Publishing, 2020.

In the foreword to her book-length poem Salient, Elizabeth Gray writes, “This work began by juxtaposing two obsessions of mine that took root in the late 1960s: the Battle of Passchendaele, fought by the British Army in Flanders in late 1917, and the chöd ritual, the core ‘severance’ practice of a lineage founded by Machik Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.”

Ashland, Oregon, White Cloud Press, 2019.

Native Persian speakers hold a special bond with Hafiz. Poems from his Díwán (collected works) are memorized by men, women, and children from all strands of society, from scholars to school children, entrepreneurs to nomads. Hafiz was the unrivaled master of the ghazal, a lyric form roughly equivalent to the English sonnet in length, intensity, and complexity.

New York City, Four Way Books, 2015.

Anchored by braided and unstable narratives of young Westerners in India, the poems in Series | India explore the rich borderlands that run between the familiar and the foreign, illumination and opacity, gods and charlatans.

New Haven, Connecticut: Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, 2013.

For centuries poetry has served as both an expression of, and vehicle for, dissent in Iran. This collection of poems begins with a ghazal of the great Hafiz, written in the 14th century, and concludes with a poem written by Simin Behbahani in the wake of the 2009 election violence in the Islamic Republic.

Ashland, Oregon, White Cloud Press, 1995.

Hafiz-i Shirazi (d. 1389 CE) is acknowledged to be the pre-eminent poet of Iran. Throughout the Persian-speaking world his mystical love poetry is recited and sung in the bazaar; on the radio; and at familial, literary or spiritual gatherings. His Diwan, or collected works, is held in such high esteem that, like the Qur’an, it is used for divination and augury.