Description
About the Author
Farnaz Fatemi is a founding member of the Hive Poetry Collective and was a writing instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her poems and prose appear in Catamaran Literary Reader, Crab Orchard Review, Grist Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and several anthologies, including Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora.
Reviews
Foreword Indie Awards Honorable Mention 2023 in Poetry
"Fatemi makes language think aloud and sing in these ruminative, beautiful poems." -Publishers Weekly *starred review*
"Farnaz Fatemi's Sister Tongue explores the experience of living between the cultures of Iran and the United States, and of trying to find a voice to describe that in-betweenness. The poems take root in various liminal spaces, tracking the poet's journey through cross-cultural identity and expression."-Pedestal Magazine
"In her debut verse collection, Farnaz Fatemi skillfully explores the nuanced between-life of Farsi and English and how that negative space houses language, displacement, longing, and the materiality of memory. .... This celebration of honoring roots, as a poem and a collection of poems, creates a treasury of understanding and introduction within the Iranian diaspora as a culture." -World Literature Today
"...[a] complex [and] dazzling collection of poetry and poetic prose..." -EscapeIntoLife.com
"In Sister Tongue, Fatemi shines gorgeous light on the liminal space between languages, bearing witness to the joy and longing that accompany every act of translation." -Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars
"Delicious, provocative, and incredibly wise, Farnaz Fatemi transcends years and oceans in these pages. Like gripping a cup and string to the ear, Sister Tongue is a hopeful missive, proof of words and their witnesses, an atlas of the wonder of becoming."-T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
"I praise the present tense of these poems for its tensile strength, its ability to hold the struggle that is happening in the past, present, and future. The way it speaks of the perpetual, of what it is to be tongue-tied in the presence of one's other self. 'Language is geological,' this speaker tells us, 'a process of accumulation, and accretion accompanied by landslides.' In setting out to speak the language of her blood, she finds herself at once estranged and embraced. Thrilled and defeated. What to do with such a natural disaster? These poems persist in their attempts to bridge worlds, offering hope of a complex and hard-won reconciliation, one richly crafted line at a time. In the words of Fatemi, 'I want the foreigner in me / to meet the foreigner in me.'" -Danusha Lameris, author of Bonfire Opera
"Sister Tongue, Farnaz Fatemi's debut poetry collection, transports us to a place where language must stretch to fit the largeness of human love and longing, and in doing so, fills the absences we did not even know we harbored. Sister Tongue begins to say what many of us already know-that borders and countries are too limiting to define us. Her poems offer us both a reckoning and a salve."-Persis M. Karim, chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University
"Poet Farnaz Fatemi is the soulful Iranian American truth-teller and wonder-wanderer we've needed to hear. In Farsi, in English, in Tehran, or California, these poems cherish the miracle of connectedness by weaving family threads through time and space-through sisters, mothers, grandmothers, through a changed and changing world. Sister Tongue is a luscious love letter to language(s), spoken in a trusting, intimate voice. The poet recognizes the twinned solace of silence and song, of sister and self. Loss takes its seat, as it does, at the table, and Fatemi, with tea, family history, powerful memory, and a new/old tongue, inscribes it alongside the depths of beauty and joy in this radiant book of passionate understanding." -Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum
"Neither exile nor immigrant, Farnaz Fatemi writes with a double intelligence that transcends any presuppositions we might bring to a poetry of the other. She claims her strategic advantage with confidence and laser-like insight, the gift of deep listening and the power of naming, as she slips back and forth freely across borders like a master spy reporting from an uncharted world suspended between two cultures. I am optimistic that Sister Tongue speaks the language of our future."-Zara Houshmand, writera
Awards
Commended for Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards (Poetry) 2022.
Book Information
ISBN 9781606354445
Author Farnaz Fatemi
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint Kent State University Press
Publisher Kent State University Press
Weight(grams) 363g
