Born Upon the Dark Spear

Born Upon the Dark Spear
Author: Ahmad Shamlu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2015-12-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9781940625164
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Chasm. Mist. Dark Song. Hour of Execution. Behind the Wall. These are just some of the poetic titles of Ahmad Shamlu (1925-2000) that together form the cipher to one of the most powerful figures in modern world literature. Brought together here in translation for the first time, these selected works provide a gateway to the paradoxical imagination of an author who traverses immense distances of oblivion and light. On the one hand, Shamlu is known as a poet of night-raids and prison cells, dead-ends and burial orations, one for whom endlessly doomed horizons always keep him close to themes of martyrdom, fatality, rage, atrocity, and struggle. And yet, he is also the writer immortalized under the pen-name "Daybreak," a figure of illumination and ecstatic intensity who once declared himself the "vanguard of the sun" and who threatened to "hang the devil's lantern from the porch of every hidden torture chamber of this oppressive paradise." In a space caught between honor-codes and devastation, futility and apotheosis, one finds the poetic verses of Shamlu as among the first in a bloodline unbound-by-world.

Omnicide

Omnicide
Author: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0997567465
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A fragmentary catalogue of poetic derangements that reveals the ways in which mania communicates with an extreme will to annihilation What kind of circumstances provoke an obsessive focus on the most minute object or activity? And what causes such mania to blossom into the lethal conviction that everything must be annihilated? There is no turning away from the imperative to study this riddle in all its mystifying complexity and its disturbing contemporary resonance—to trace the obscure passage between a lone state of delirium and the will to world-erasure.. A fragmentary catalogue of the thousand-and-one varieties of manic disposition (augomania, dromomania, catoptromania, colossomania…), Omnicide enters the chaotic imaginations of the most significant poetic talents of the Middle East in order to instigate a new discourse on obsession, entrancement, excess, and delirium. Placing these voices into direct conversation, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh excavates an elaborate network of subterranean ideas and interpretive chambers, byways, and burrows by which mania communicates with fatality. Like secret passages leading from one of the multitudinous details of a bustling Persian miniature to the blank burning immanence of the desert, each is a contorted yet effective channel connecting some attractive universe (of adoration, worship, or astonishment) to the instinct for all-engulfing oblivion (through hatred, envy, indifference, rage, or forgetting). A captivating fractal of conceptual prisms in half-storytelling, half-theoretical prose, a rhythmic, poetic, insidious work that commands submission, Omnicide absorbs the reader into unfamiliar and estranging landscapes whose every subtle euphoric aspect threatens to become an irresistible invitation to the end of all things.

Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora

Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora
Author: Christopher Nelson
Publisher: Green Linden Press
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2021-09-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 099922638X
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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

Closing Melodies

Closing Melodies
Author: Rainer J. Hanshe
Publisher: Contra Mundum Press
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2023-10-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1940625521
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As the 19th century comes to a close, Friedrich Nietzsche and Vincent van Gogh unknowingly traverse proximate geographical terrain, nearly circling one another like close but distant stars as the philosopher wanders between Nizza, Sils Maria, and Torino, and the painter wanders between Paris, Arles, and Saint-Rémy. In the midst of their philosophical and artistic pursuits, simultaneously, the Eiffel Tower, symbol of artistic progress and industrialization, begins to rise in Paris amidst clamors of protest and praise. ​ Through intertwining letters written to (& sometimes by) friends, family, and others, the philosopher and painter are brought into ever-greater proximity as we witness their daily personal and artistic struggles. Woven between and interrupting this panoply of voices are a series of intervals, short illuminating blasts, like a camera’s exploding flash powder, of artistic, scientific, political, and other events spanning 1888 to 1890, drawing Nietzsche and Van Gogh in and out of the wider expanses of history. ​ As construction of the Eiffel Tower comes to completion in Paris and Elisabeth Förster, the sister of the philosopher of the will to power, tries to found a utopic race colony in South America, the lives of Nietzsche and Van Gogh come to their terrible denouements. Her brother now a full-fledged zombie, the former queen of Nueva Germania seizes the reins of his living corpse and rides him into the future. ​ With no deus ex machina in sight, and none possible, WWI and the terrors and the beauties of the 20th century crack the horizon.

One Thousand & One

One Thousand & One
Author: KARI. HUKKILA
Publisher: Contra Mundum Press
Total Pages: 34
Release: 2023-12-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1940625629
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Kari Hukkila’s One Thousand & One is a philosophical, essayistic novel about catastrophes, both natural and man-made, about humans’ ability to respond to catastrophes by thinking or, at the very least, simply managing to survive. Hukkila’s novel is a cornucopia of micro-histories, digressions, and a broad gallery of characters ranging from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to an Ethiopian refugee in Rome. One Thousand & One begins when a large birch tree falls on a cabin near the Russian border in eastern Finland, leaving the narrator unable to concentrate on a writing project he has been at work on. He decides then to take up an invitation to Rome, where his lifelong friend has lived since abandoning a life in philosophy. In Hukkila’s novel, Scheherazade’s survival by continuing to tell stories is reimagined as survival by continuing to think, a continued thought activity, often taken to extremes, the preservation of humanity in an inhumane world. In David Hackston’s eloquent translation, Hukkila’s musical, meandering, thought-provoking prose is full of savage, ironic, and luminous humor, remaining uncompromisingly alive until the final sentence. One Thousand & One is the first in a projected series of five novels. Upon its release in Finland in 2016 it was said to bear “all the hallmarks of a classic.”

Elemental Disappearances

Elemental Disappearances
Author: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2016-11-28
Genre: Arts
ISBN: 0998237558
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"Elemental Disappearances casts a wanderer's eye upon an ever-expanding configuration of sites of disturbance. The things sought after are apparitional: they appear and disappear at will; they perfect the art of materialization and vanishing. Such is the nature of living dangerously, and with it the short duration of enchantment. This collection tracks provocative ideas, artifacts, and phenomena rising and fading across different territories of the contemporary world. Through a constellation of powerful thought-images, the authors uncover spaces of an ephemeral and fugitive nature in order to generate a fractal vision of our time and beyond." (back cover)

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems
Author: Forough Farrokhzad
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0811232387
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A ravishing new translation of Iran’s trailblazing, feminist poet in an indispensable collection In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as iconic and influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a pioneer of modernist Iranian literature and as a leading figure of contemporary world literature. Farrokhzad, as Elizabeth Gray writes in the preface, “remains a beacon to artists, especially women and marginalized artists, who seek freedom in all its forms.” This thoughtfully curated, deftly translated selection of Farrokhzad’s poems includes work from her whole writing life, early to late. Readers will thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of the quotidian; of longing, loss, and desire; of classical reinvention; of lexical variation and sonic beauty; of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.

The Love Poems of Ahmad Shamlu

The Love Poems of Ahmad Shamlu
Author: Ahmad Shamlu
Publisher: Ibex Publishers
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2017-03-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1588140377
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Ahmad Shamlu (1925-2000) is among the most celebrated figures of contemporary Iranian literature. The poems presented here, capture Shamlu’s unique depictions of love. The narrator in these poems is a man intoxicated by the love of a woman; a woman whom we meet in the body of his love poetry; a female presentation whose characteristics are not fixed. Due to Shamlu's widely recognized prominence within the intellectual opposition, the mainstream approach to his poetry has largely evaluated it in terms of the socio-political background of the poet's era. Taking issue with this limiting approach, the present work emphasizes an alternative reading of Shamlu, based on a primarily aesthetic analysis of the theme of aphrodisiac love in his poetry. More specifically, the present text is focused on the poet/lover's meditation on a beloved elevated to the stature of a goddess. This woman's metaphoric identity casts her as the muse and the audience. She is, with all her attendant dangers, the poet's realization of beauty and desire for being. The Love Poems of Ahmad Shamlu incorporates poems that trace the development of the relationship among the lover, the beloved, and love, in ShamluÂ’s poetry. The selection includes poems that go back to the beginning of ShamluÂ’s career when he was still experimenting with language and style in search of his own poetic voice. The chapters preceding the poems in translation, provide some insight into the life of Shamlu as well as his poetry. This work has valuable scholarly and pedagogic implications. While it is a contribution to the scholarship on the work of Shamlu, it also provides a concise translated collection that can be useful for students of Persian language and literature. This work can also serve as a textbook for courses in comparative and Persian literatures. Considering the growing interest in Persian poetry during the recent years, this book will further be of interest for audiences beyond speakers of Persian.

Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face Tomorrow
Author: Javier Marías
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2005
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811217279
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A daring masterwork by Javier Marias: "Spain's most subtle and gifted writer." (The Boston Globe)

Omnicide II

Omnicide II
Author: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1733628177
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An infernal catalogue of manic visionaries, inspired by the poetry of the Middle East. In a new work in which conceptual elaboration, storytelling, and poetics are fused in the infernal heat of the desert, the cycle of Omnicide is closed with a philosophy of doom, deception, and the game, plunging headlong into the inevitable, the fatal, and the infinite. A series of controlled combustions fuelled by fragments drawn from the poetry and literature of the Middle-East, Omnicide II introduces us to a new cast of manic visionaries, from the Selemaniac to the Crystallomaniac, the Bibliomaniac to the Aeromaniac. In his relentless cataloguing of the myriad figures and portents of omnicidal doom, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh resumes the offensive of those writers, artists, and thinkers for whom the fiercest creative incandescence is only kindled in the shadow of certain doom. Amid war cries and lullabies, mages, wolves and pelicans, sabres and crystals, drones and soul-stealers, in settings ranging from the opium den to the Qatari luxury hotels, with his unique style and methodology, his dizzying breadth of references, and his implacable will to follow the most deranging lines of thought and evoke the most startling images, Mohaghegh draws the reader into territories disturbing and unfamiliar, atmospheres delicate and grotesque, moods morbid yet life-affirming, in a book that evokes fever and exudes dead calm. The utterly absorbing music of this writing both lulls and disquiets—a contemporary Necronomicon, an inexhaustible treasury of recipes for disaster, catastrophe, ruination and destruction, all in the name of the most intense creation.