Kaveh Bassiri
Kaveh Bassiri is an Iranian-American writer and translator. He has received the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. His poems appear in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, Nimrod International Journal, the Mississippi Review, and Best New Poets. His chapbook 99 Names of Exile, the winner of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, will be published in 2019.
Reading List
Homecoming
When everyone has gone, while the clouds still argue loud with the stars, I sit near him, wipe his shoulders, dip my hand in the small of his back, unbutton the pump, the drainage. I unwrap the blue robe, like candy. Scent of moldered covers pours on the floor, I rise over my father, lunate, […]
Blood
You weren’t in your house. The restive candles waved us in. I didn’t see you climbing up the minbar as I bent down, a dome to shelter you. In the bites from the chains, the taste for iron in blood, picketers at your door. You didn’t come when I summoned the army of your names, […]
Writing Persian
In the days when I was Kevin in San Jose and the girls at the mixer thought Iran was in East Asia, my Catholic high school teacher warned me, “You have trouble with winding sentences, articles, prepositions, too many possessives.” “Yes, I definitely have problems with relationships,” I pleaded, “my cat hides in the drawers, […]