ISBN: 9780811231657

Paperback: 128 pages
Publisher: New Directions Publishing, 2022
Language: English

In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a feminist trailblazer of Iranian literature and as an iconoclast figure of contemporary world literature. As Mehdi Jami writes in the Guardian, “In every culture you have cultural icons, like Shakespeare in Britain. Farrokhzad was like that for contemporary Iran, someone who formed the identity of our contemporariness.”

Thoughtfully curated and deftly translated by the poet Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., this selected poems gathers work from Farrokhzad’s whole writing life, early to late, including the entirety of her posthumous book Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, which gives this collection its name. Readers can thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of desire and loss, of classical reinvention, of lexical variation and sonic beauty, of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.