Description
Queer Iranian love poems from an expat writer in Italy.
Drawing extensively on Iranian poetic traditions and the history of their reception in English translation, Feast of the Ass presents a series of verses that play in the fields of love poetry’s address. Khajavi irreverently ruffles the “classical grandeur & quiet dignity” of inherited forms in order to consider the poet’s relationship to death, literature, race, religion, and sexuality, his “queer shoulder / set not to the wheel—so long, Solon!—but turned on to some bolder / axon.”
Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies.
"Khajavi writes convivial queer occasional poems in classical Persian forms, smuggling countertradition inside a tradition that is already smuggling a countertradition— one of the most subversively “traditional” poets I’ve worked with." — Joyelle McSweeney
Author Bio
Jahan Khajavi (born 1986 in Fresno, California) is an Iranian-American poet who lives in Rome and hosts the weekly reading Suddenly Every Wednesday.
Author City: Rome ITA