The Essential Voices Series intends to correct misrepresentations and misunderstandings in the broader culture. At its heart is the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity.

Essential Voices: The Poetry of Iran & Its Diaspora

The anthology features 130 poets and translators from ten countries, including Garous Abdolmalekian, Kaveh Akbar, Kazim Ali, Reza Baraheni, Kaveh Bassiri, Simin Behbahani, Mark S. Burrows, Athena Farrokhzad, Forugh Farrokhzad, Persis Karim, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Sara Khalili, Mimi Khalvati, Esmail Khoi, Abbas Kiarostami, Fayre Makeig, Anis Mojgani, Yadollah Royai, Amir Safi, SAID, H.E. Sayeh, Roger Sedarat, Sohrab Sepehri, Ahmad Shamlu, Solmaz Sharif, Niloufar Talebi, Jean Valentine, Stephen Watts, Sholeh Wolpé, Nima Yushij, and many others.

Between arm-flexing states, the U.S. and Iran, the past burns and the future is held hostage. In a twilight present tense, the poets emerge, sure-footed and graceful, imagining another way, another vision of being. The range of these Iranian poets is prodigious and dizzying. Sometimes they "consider the saga of a bee / humming over minefields / in pursuit of a flower," sometimes they "bring your lips near / and pour your voice / into my mouth." Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora is a place where heartbreak and hope gather. At the shores of language, drink this bracing, slaking music. —Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps

Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora takes the extraordinary position that poetic arts from the homeland and diaspora should be read alongside each other. This vital book invites English-language readers to step into a lineage and tradition where poems—from playful to elegiac, prosaic to ornate—are fundamental to everyday living. It is the kind of book that requires two copies: one to give to a beloved, and one to keep for oneself. —Neda Maghbouleh, author of The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race

Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora offers a profoundly satisfying journey into the poetic canon of my homeland—an anthology with an ambition, expanse, depth, and diversity that truly earns its essential tag. So many poets I was hoping would be in here are here, from contemporary icons to new luminaries, plus I got to explore several poets I had never before read. Everyone from students of poetry to masters of the form should take this ride through the soul and psyche of Iran, which endures no matter where the border, beyond whatever the boundary! —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity

Iranians rely on poetry to give comfort, elevate the ordinary, and illuminate the darkness. Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora layers the work of the masters with fresh voices, using sensual imagery to piece together a society fractured by revolution, war, and exile. Let the poets lead you into an Iran beyond the news reports—a place where tenderness and humor and bitterness and melancholia balance together like birds on a wire, intricately connected and poised to take flight. —Tara Bahrampour, author of To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America

Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry

This anthology features 100 poets who illuminate the queer experience in the U.S., four generations of living writers, as varied in their subjects and styles as the nation they represent: rural, urban, young, old, academic, blue-collar, activist, domestic, cosmopolitan, local, brazen, subtle, out, and passing—including Kaveh Akbar, Rick Barot, Frank Bidart, Richard Blanco, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, CAConrad, Natalie Diaz, Mark Doty, Nikky Finney, Nikki Giovanni, Marilyn Hacker, Robin Coste Lewis, Timothy Liu, Eileen Myles, Carl Phillips, Justin Phillip Reed, Kay Ryan, Sam Sax, Richard Siken, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and many others.

“I come to this anthology having languished, having felt benumbed, having come to question, at my very core, poetry’s value, its potency, as we contend with our current brand of American tyranny, our Hour of Lead. As I read Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, I experience an incremental awakening, or re-awakening. Every poem, every phrase in every poem, clicks a small switch in me that had been shut down, repairs a blown fuse, brings a wound into the light, provokes it into being, or staunches it. The exhilarative truth-telling and wit, the poems that walk the page with a humble gait, and those that ego-strut, the foundational voices and the newly arrived, remind me of what poetry has been in similarly oppressive times, its capacity for liberative endurance. From the first lines of the opening poem, Frank Bidart’s ‘Queer’—Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything—an entreaty against self-deception, we find ourselves in veracity’s realm, where language reigns free. … The lines of these poems accordion, inhale, exhale, serpentine, straighten, curl. A carnival of approaches to diction, positionality, structure, song. This anthology is not representative of a sector of American poetry. It is American poetry. The party contains multitudes and hints at multitudes to come. When I reach the last lines of the final poem, torrin a. greathouse’s ‘On Using the Wo|men’s Bathroom,’ I am no longer numb.” —Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize