Feast of the Ass

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.