Nabood - by Fatemeh Shams & Armen Davoudian (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The newest collection by internationally acclaimed dissident Iranian poet examines loss and longing, eros and exile.

Yeki bood, yeki nabood. There was and there was not. So begin the old Persian fairy tales as a world already split between presence and absence. In Nabood, Fatemeh Shams turns that childhood formula into a grammar of exile. The poems trace a geographical and emotional diaspora, moving from the execution squares of Mashhad through to the haunted history of Berlin, from the brutalized landscapes of America to the historical wounds of Auschwitz and Palestine. Nabood is a testament to the poet's oldest power: to name what was, what was not, and what must never disappear.

About the Author

Fatemeh Shams is an internationally acclaimed poet and an associate professor of Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of four poetry collections in Persian and English, 88, Writing in the Mist, When They Broke Down the Door, and Hopscotch; a critical monograph in English, A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option under the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press); and multiple articles and literary essays on poetry, gender, politics, and censorship. She is currently working on a second critical monograph about the embodiment of exile in the modern Persian poetry of Iran and Afghanistan.

Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House), which won the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. His poems and translations have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Best Literary Translations, and elsewhere. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and lives in Berkeley, California.