The Essential Voices series intends to bridge English-language readers to cultures misunderstood and under- or misrepresented. It has at its heart the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. The anthology features 130 poets and translators from ten countries, including Garous Abdolmalekian, Kaveh Akbar, Kazim Ali, Reza Baraheni, Kaveh Bassiri, Simin Behbahani, Mark S. Burrows, Athena Farrokhzad, Forugh Farrokhzad, Persis Karim, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Sara Khalili, Mimi Khalvati, Esmail Khoi, Abbas Kiarostami, Fayre Makeig, Anis Mojgani, Yadollah Royai, Amir Safi, SAID, H.E. Sayeh, Roger Sedarat, Sohrab Sepehri, Ahmad Shamlu, Solmaz Sharif, Niloufar Talebi, Jean Valentine, Stephen Watts, Sholeh Wolpé, Nima Yushij, and many others. Praise Between arm-flexing states, the U.S. and Iran, the past burns and the future is held hostage. In a twilight present tense, the poets emerge, sure-footed and graceful, imagining another way, another vision of being. The range of these Iranian poets is prodigious and dizzying. Sometimes they "consider the saga of a bee / humming over minefields / in pursuit of a flower," sometimes they "bring your lips near / and pour your voice / into my mouth." Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora is a place where heartbreak and hope gather. At the shores of language, drink this bracing, slaking music. —Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora takes the extraordinary position that poetic arts from the homeland and diaspora should be read alongside each other. This vital book invites English-language readers to step into a lineage and tradition where poems—from playful to elegiac, prosaic to ornate—are fundamental to everyday living. It is the kind of book that requires two copies: one to give to a beloved, and one to keep for oneself. —Neda Maghbouleh, author of The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora offers a profoundly satisfying journey into the poetic canon of my homeland—an anthology with an ambition, expanse, depth, and diversity that truly earns its essential tag. So many poets I was hoping would be in here are here, from contemporary icons to new luminaries, plus I got to explore several poets I had never before read. Everyone from students of poetry to masters of the form should take this ride through the soul and psyche of Iran, which endures no matter where the border, beyond whatever the boundary! —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity Iranians rely on poetry to give comfort, elevate the ordinary, and illuminate the darkness. Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora layers the work of the masters with fresh voices, using sensual imagery to piece together a society fractured by revolution, war, and exile. Let the poets lead you into an Iran beyond the news reports—a place where tenderness and humor and bitterness and melancholia balance together like birds on a wire, intricately connected and poised to take flight.  —Tara Bahrampour, author of To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America

The Essential Voices series intends to bridge English-language readers to cultures misunderstood and under- or misrepresented. It has at its heart the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. The anthology features 130 poets and translators from ten countries, including Garous Abdolmalekian, Kaveh Akbar, Kazim Ali, Reza Baraheni, Kaveh Bassiri, Simin Behbahani, Mark S. Burrows, Athena Farrokhzad, Forugh Farrokhzad, Persis Karim, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Sara Khalili, Mimi Khalvati, Esmail Khoi, Abbas Kiarostami, Fayre Makeig, Anis Mojgani, Yadollah Royai, Amir Safi, SAID, H.E. Sayeh, Roger Sedarat, Sohrab Sepehri, Ahmad Shamlu, Solmaz Sharif, Niloufar Talebi, Jean Valentine, Stephen Watts, Sholeh Wolpé, Nima Yushij, and many others. Praise Between arm-flexing states, the U.S. and Iran, the past burns and the future is held hostage. In a twilight present tense, the poets emerge, sure-footed and graceful, imagining another way, another vision of being. The range of these Iranian poets is prodigious and dizzying. Sometimes they "consider the saga of a bee / humming over minefields / in pursuit of a flower," sometimes they "bring your lips near / and pour your voice / into my mouth." Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora is a place where heartbreak and hope gather. At the shores of language, drink this bracing, slaking music. —Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora takes the extraordinary position that poetic arts from the homeland and diaspora should be read alongside each other. This vital book invites English-language readers to step into a lineage and tradition where poems—from playful to elegiac, prosaic to ornate—are fundamental to everyday living. It is the kind of book that requires two copies: one to give to a beloved, and one to keep for oneself. —Neda Maghbouleh, author of The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora offers a profoundly satisfying journey into the poetic canon of my homeland—an anthology with an ambition, expanse, depth, and diversity that truly earns its essential tag. So many poets I was hoping would be in here are here, from contemporary icons to new luminaries, plus I got to explore several poets I had never before read. Everyone from students of poetry to masters of the form should take this ride through the soul and psyche of Iran, which endures no matter where the border, beyond whatever the boundary! —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity Iranians rely on poetry to give comfort, elevate the ordinary, and illuminate the darkness. Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora layers the work of the masters with fresh voices, using sensual imagery to piece together a society fractured by revolution, war, and exile. Let the poets lead you into an Iran beyond the news reports—a place where tenderness and humor and bitterness and melancholia balance together like birds on a wire, intricately connected and poised to take flight.  —Tara Bahrampour, author of To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America

This unique book is the first publication on the art of teaching Persian literature in English, consisting of 18 chapters by prominent early-career, mid-career and established scholars, who generously share their experiences and methodologies in teaching both classical and modern Persian literature across various academic traditions in the world. The volume is divided into three parts: the background to teaching Persian literature: pedagogy, translation and canon, and thematic and topical approaches to the Persian literature class. It includes such topics as the history of teaching Persian literature, the traditional teaching of Persian literature, the political and ideological intentions revealed in the formation of the Persian literature curriculum, the necessity to include marginalized modern Persian literature, such as women’s or diaspora literature, and more applied approaches to curriculum development and teaching. Contributors Manizheh Abdollahi, Samad Alavi, Natalia Chalisova, Cameron Cross, Dick Davis, M. R. Ghanoonparvar, Persis Karim, Sooyong Kim, Daniela Meneghini, Jane Mikkelson, Amir Moosavi, Evgeniya Nikitenko, Austin O’Malley, Farideh Pourgiv, Nasrin Rahimieh, Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Farshad Sonboldel, Claudia Yaghoobi, and Mohammad Jafar Yahaghi.

A collaboration between an ethnographer, a bilingual poet, and an Anglo-Irish literature scholar, this multilingual volume includes 100 Likoos, a syllabic genre of oral poetry, in their original Roudbari, accompanied by English and Persian translations. Likoo is one of the oldest and most concise forms of oral poetry in the Iranian plateau. Composed in the languages of the people of Roudbar and Balochistan in southeast Iran, Likoos are a testament to the cultural diversity and linguistic richness of the region. Likoos echo the lives of people in Roudbar, the lives of those living in the oasis, surrounded by the desert. They depict life in the desert with all its hardships, challenges, and failures. Likoos are the poetry of short joys and continuous hardship, reflecting the brutality of life dominated by nomadic social relations. They are the voice of a lover who catches a glimpse of his beloved in the desert, the call of a camel driver in the lonely nights of the desert on a dry path, or the mourning over the death of a young person due to tribal violence. The publication of this work has been supported by a 2021 Persian Heritage Foundation grant for publication.

In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet’s uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, “You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what’s missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong.” Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.

“Brilliant and deft and heartfelt."—Richie Hofmann Wry, tender, and formally innovative, Armen Davoudian’s debut poetry collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars, tells the story of a self estranged from the world around him as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America. It is a story darkened by the long shadow of global tragedies—the Armenian genocide, war in the Middle East, the specter of homophobia. With masterful attention to rhyme and meter, these poems also carefully witness the most intimate encounters: the awkward distance between mother and son getting ready in the morning, the delicate balance of power between lovers, a tense exchange with the morality police in Iran. In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars—but, reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of Davoudian’s magical, ruminative poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, a home for the speaker, who is unable to return to it in life.

What is the secret of happiness? What is the nature of love? What makes us good hosts or good guests? What traits should we seek out in friends and seek to embody as friends ourselves? How should we approach the sensual beauties of this world- when do they induce us to error and when are they signs of God? The poets and bards of many traditions have long sought answers to such questions, but perhaps no culture has taken up this challenge with more passionate urgency than that of Persia, from the ninth century AD to modern-day Iran. These eleven centuries of poetic tradition include poets who have become well-known in the West, such as 'Umar Khayyam, Rumi, and Hafiz, as well as many others whom Westerners have yet to discover. In Iran these poems remain part of everyday popular culture, with people of all classes and levels of education able to recite them from memory, even if they may not always be sure who the poets were, where they came from, or what precisely was the spiritual intent behind the verse. In Persian Words of Wisdom, the US-based Iranian scholar Bahman Solati has compiled hundreds of examples reflecting his country's religious and spiritual traditions, especially the Shia branch of Islam and Islamic Sufism, but also the Zoroastrian faith. This bilingual edition with his own English translations further illuminates the sometimes enigmatic poems with parallel Western proverbs, as well as comparison quotations from Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist scripture and secular sources ranging from Mark Twain to Dale Carnegie. One of Solati's goals in this anthology is to build a cultural bridge through poetry between the West and Iran, making these treasures of Persian culture more available both to Westerners generally and, most specifically, to young people of Iranian descent who have grown up in the English-speaking world, perhaps without fully understanding the wealth of their heritage. For them and all readers, this will be a book of discovery.

Finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation A vivid, "mesmerizing" (New York Times Magazine) portrait of life in the shadow of violence and loss, for readers of both English and Persian The first selection of poems by renowned Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this collection is a captivating, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise. Abdolmalekian resists definitive separations between cause and effect, life and death, or heaven and hell, and challenges our sense of what is fixed and what is unsettled and permeable. Though the speakers in these poems are witnesses to the deforming effects of grief and memory, they remain alive to curiosity, to the pleasure of companionship, and to other ways of being and seeing. Lean Against This Late Hour illuminates the images we conjure in the face of abandonment and ruin, and finds them by turns frightening, bewildering, ethereal, and defiant. "This time," a disembodied voice commands, "send us a prophet who only listens."

One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe’eh, who lived over a thousand years ago) and there have been women poets writing in Persian in virtually every generation since that time until the present. Before the twentieth century they tended to come from society’s social extremes. Many were princesses, a good number were hired entertainers of one kind or another, and they were active in many different countries – Iran of course, but also India, Afghanistan, and areas of central Asia that are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Not surprisingly, a lot of their poetry sounds like that of their male counterparts, but a lot doesn’t; there are distinctively bawdy and flirtatious poems by medieval women poets, poems from virtually every era in which the poet complains about her husband (sometimes light-heartedly, sometimes with poignant seriousness), touching poems on the death of a child, and many epigrams centered on little details that bring a life from hundreds of years ago vividly before our eyes. This new bilingual edition of The Mirror of My Heart – the poems in Persian and English on facing pages – is a unique and captivating collection introduced and translated by Dick Davis, an acclaimed scholar and translator of Persian literature as well as a gifted poet in his own right. In his introduction he provides fascinating background detail on Persian poetry written by women through the ages, including common themes and motifs and a brief overview of Iranian history showing how women poets have been affected by the changing dynasties. From Rabe’eh in the tenth century to Fatemeh Ekhtesari in the twenty-first, each of the eighty-four poets in this volume is introduced in a short biographical note, while explanatory notes give further insight into the poems themselves.

Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.