“In his new collection of poetry, Roger Sedarat strikes the perfect balance between Eastern and Western expression, between the modern and the medieval, and between the sacred and the profane. A delight on every page, one can’t help but imagine that if Hafez, Rumi, and other Sufi mystic poets — even Goethe — were transported to the twenty–first century, their tweets might read something like this.”
Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollahs’ Democracy: An Iranian Challenge
“Roger Sedarat’s Ghazal Games is an outstanding example of the genre.”
Gino’s Blog
“Playfully, humorously, Sedarat confronts issues such as religious hypocrisy and dogma head on…. Though Ghazal Games may appear a broadly experimental endeavor at first, its tone and carefully crafted phraseology remain consistent throughout. It is an excellent educational tool for creative writers and, as the following selections demonstrate, a delightful read.”
Frontline, “Tehran Bureau”
“These poems are to be savored in their audacity — in turn witty, erotic, ludic, learned, engaged. Roger Sedarat’s ghazals bridge the form’s (and the poet’s) Persian sources to American demotic language, and open couplet windows on transnational reality.”
Marilyn Hacker, winner of the National Book Award and author of Names: Poems
As an Iranian American poet, Roger Sedarat fuses Western and Eastern traditions to reinvent the classicalPersian form of the ghazal. For its humor as well as its spirituality, the poems in this collection can perhapsbest be described as “Wallace Stevens meets Rumi.” Perhaps most striking is the poet’s use of the ancient ghazal form in the tradition of the classical masters like Hafez and Rumi to politically challenge the Islamic Republic of Iran’s continual crackdown on protesters. Not since the late Agha Shahid Ali has a poet translated the letter as well as the spirit of this form into English, using musicality and inventive rhyme to extend the reach of the ghazal in a new language and tradition.
Roger Sedarat is an assistant professor in the MFA program at Queens College. He is the recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as well as a St. Botolph Society poetry grant. His verse has appeared in such journals as New England Review, Atlanta Review, and Poet Lore. More info →
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Release date: June 2011
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Release date: June 2011
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“Ghazal Games overflows with intelligent charm: its well-formed couplets, fueled by iconoclasm, are blessed with clarity, goodheartedness, pizzazz, and prankishness. Let’s crown Roger Sedarat the king of Carnival; long may he reign.”
Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Best–Selling Jewish Porn Films
“Now more than ever, the world needs to hear from Roger Sedarat. Since his career began, he’s been raging against oppressive regimes throughout the world, but his focus is Iran. He wants his work to help the Iranian people seize their country for their own. Sometimes this plays out in a symbolic way in his work, and sometimes in more literal fashion. He laments lost loved ones, lost human rights, and lost culture. He focuses his anger to a point and uses it to change people’s minds.”
Stuff for the Teen Age, a blog of The New York Public Library
“A unique and concise collection of interactive poems.”
Persian Heritage
Cracks in the Invisible
Poems
By Stephen Kampa
Stephen Kampa’s poems are witty and restless in their pursuit of an intelligent modern faith. They range from a four-line satire of office inspirational posters to a lengthy meditation on the silence of God.
The Room Within
Poems
By Moore Moran
The Room Within is a retrospective survey of a poetic career dating back to the late fifties. A student of Yvor Winters at Stanford, Moore Moran has deservedly earned a reputation, along with fellow Winters students Turner Cassity and Edgar Bowers, as a “poet’s poet.”
Unsettled Accounts
Poems
By Will Wells
To take the mess of life and make meaning from it is what all poets seek to do. For Will Wells, recipient of the thirteenth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, this includes reaching across centuries and continents, into the minds and hearts of disparate individuals—Albert Einstein, Andrea Yates, the traveler from Porlock, Dante, or Holocaust survivors, including his own grandmother—to extract the personal value embedded there for him.By
The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets
Edited by David Yezzi
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Foreword by J. D. McClatchy
Groundbreaking anthologies of this kind come along once in a generation and, in time, define that generation. The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets identifies a group of poets who have recently begun to make an important mark on contemporary poetry, and their accomplishment and influence will only grow with time. The poets gathered here do not constitute a school or movement; rather they are a group of unique artists working at the top of their craft.
