[04/27/27] Shams, Fatemeh: Nabood

Copper Canyon Press, paperback

Translated by Armen Davoudian

Publication Date: April 27, 2027

Publisher Marketing: 

The newest collection by internationally acclaimed dissident Iranian poet examines loss and longing, eros and exile.

Yeki bood, yeki nabood. There was and there was not. So begin the old Persian fairy tales as a world already split between presence and absence. In Nabood, Fatemeh Shams turns that childhood formula into a grammar of exile. The poems trace a geographical and emotional diaspora, moving from the execution squares of Mashhad through to the haunted history of Berlin, from the brutalized landscapes of America to the historical wounds of Auschwitz and Palestine. Nabood is a testament to the poet's oldest power: to name what was, what was not, and what must never disappear.