The Paris Review asked those whose translations appeared in the summer issue to contribute to their online “Staff Picks” feature, a brief note on something each of us has been reading or watching. This micro-essay pursues 250 Australian and British soldiers who went “missing” in the Battle of Fromelles in 1916, and who were finally tracked down and reburied with full honors in 2010. Maps and aerial reconnaissance photos included. View here. (2020).
Other Work
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Read this Review“How Pirate and Parrot (Mis)Understand One Another” Review of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi,”
Eugene Ostashevsky, Hyperallergic (July 2016)
Read this Review““Squaring the Circle” Review of CANTILENA”
Hyperallergic (July 2016)
Read this Review“Maudelle Driskell, Talismans.”
The Collagist, Issue #65 (December 2014)
“Amirrezvani, Anita and Persis Karim, Eds. Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers”
The Harvard Review Online (September 2014)
“Eliza Griswold, Tr. I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan”
The Harvard Review Online (June 2014)
“Heidi Lynn Staples. Noise Event”
The Harvard Review Online (February 2014)
“Niloufar Talebi, trans. BeLonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World”
The Harvard Review Online. (January 2011)
“Agha Shahid Ali. Call Me Ishmael Tonight”
The Harvard Review. 25 (Fall 2003)
“Sebastian Faulks and Jorg Hensgen. The Vintage Book of War Fiction”
The Harvard Review. 24 (Spring 2003)
“Agha Shahid Ali. Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English”
The Harvard Review. 20 (Spring 2001)
““Squaring the Circle” Review of CANTILENA, by John Peck Hyperallergic (July 2016)”
“C. P. Cavafy. The Essential Cavafy. Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard, trans”
The Harvard Review. 10 (Spring 1996)
“The Cilappatikaram of Ilanko Atikal. R. Parthasarthy, trans.”
The Harvard Review. 9 (Fall 1995)
“Henri Michaux. Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984. David Ball, trans”
The Harvard Review. 8 (Spring 1995)
Critical Work
The Battle of Fromelles
Dispatches from a Pandemic
The Harvard Review asked some of its authors to contribute to this online feature. Dispatches came in from all over the world, and here’s mine, from the Upper East Side. (2020)
The Untranslatable
The Paris Review asked the translators from its summer issue to discuss a word or a line that evaded any efforts to bring it into English. Forough Farrokzad uses the Persian word for “table” to do a dizzying array of things in her poem “After You,” discussed here. (2020).
The Obstacle
e Poetry Society of America asked for author comments on a poem from Salient. A discussion on the origins of the poem, “The Obstacle,” and its context within the book, can be found in their “In Their Own Words” feature on the PSA site, here. (2020).
Coming in on a Wing and a Lyre: Nathaniel Tarn’s Avia
Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (March 2019)
Iran: Poems of Dissent
Introductory essay, Poetry International No. 18/19. (2013).
POETRY, Letter to the Editor
Poetry, Vol. 203, No. 1 (October 2013).
The Origins of a Text
The Harvard Review. (Spring 1995).
Poems
Albania
On Sunday I went to Albania.
No one understood, clearly, at first, why I (or anyone) would go to Albania.
Except my father, who knew at once: “Because, before, you couldn’t go to Albania.”
In the Alleyway of the Beloved
It was no dream, back then,
in the high cold between the mountains,
at the rim of the gravel pits west of the city,
watching the dog fights, the men with whips taking bets,
The Stave Church at Urnes
Before you bow your head to enter in
and honor the carpenter’s thin son,
look up at us, at what
seem vines and lilies in a braid
a tendrilled border for the door—
To Cure
Deep in your marrow-lair, worm, hear me.
Bore, marrow-worm, through his bone.
Bore through bone into his meat.
Swim through that meat to his cold skin.
The Corner
A man is walking toward a corner
A man walking toward a corner
A man walking to the corner where there may be a woman
Maybe there will be a woman
