About
My poetry is rooted in the belief that language carries both memory and resistance. I see it not just as a tool for expression, but as a living, sensorial force—shaped by rhythm, texture, and silence. My writing often explores the tensions between identity and displacement, voice and erasure, intimacy and rupture.
Working at the edge of multiple cultures and traditions, I use nonlinear forms, layered imagery, and embodied metaphors to question dominant narratives and offer space for alternative ways of knowing. For me, poetry is not only an art form—it’s a mode of thinking and a method of transformation, where contradictions don’t need to resolve, but can remain present, heard, and alive.
A Head Full of Sounds
Sib-e Sorkh, 2020
One Head, A Thousand Sounds is a poetic exploration of womanhood, intimacy, and embodied experience. The opening section unfolds as an autobiographical journey through love, using the metaphor of a road trip—each relationship a waypoint, each turn a moment of reflection. The second section deepens these themes through lyric poems that trace the asymmetries and emotional labor of gendered love. The final section, Adan: Fertile Ground, turns unflinchingly to motherhood, narrating miscarriage, pregnancy, and birth in a visceral, unsanitized voice rarely seen in Persian poetry.
Rooted in the feminist poetics of écriture féminine, the collection employs nonlinear form, cyclical rhythms, and bodily imagery to frame womanhood as a negotiation between cultural expectation and lived reality. Nature and body here are not just metaphors—they are sites of resistance and meaning-making. Engaging thinkers like Butler and Kristeva, the book honors the physical and psychic truths of being a woman.
Bindless Epic
Sib-e Sorkh, 2019
Bindless Epic is perhaps my most ambitious poetic undertaking—an epic in fragmented form that unfolds across two movements: one set in a decaying city where women have been systematically erased, and another tracing the philosophical, emotional, and geographic journey of exile. The work interrogates collapse—of place, language, identity—and reckons with the existential dilemmas of staying or leaving.
Formally, the collection draws on the feminist aesthetics of écriture féminine, employing nonlinear structure, sensorial imagery, and a language unbound by conventional syntax.
The first section—a long poem—meditates on collective inertia and erasure, where gendered absence lingers in every line. Yet even in a city emptied of women, the feminine endures as a rhythm of resistance. The second section traces exilic subjects through rupture and reformation, where dislocation is not only spatial but epistemic. Drawing on Derrida, Kristeva, and Bakhtin, the work unfolds in layered, dialogic tensions.
Letters of Lead
Dastan Publications, 2017
Letters of Lead is an experimental co-authored poetry collection written in collaboration with Reza Rouzbahani. Structured in four interwoven sections, the book challenges conventional notions of authorship and poetic voice through a dialectical method inspired by Hegelian synthesis. The title invokes both the materiality and metaphor of “lead”—as type, as weight, as trace—and the collection explores how meaning is forged in the tension between individual expression and collective creation.
The book also includes two solo sequences: A Derridean Cypress (my contribution) and The Lost Image of Weariness (by Rouzbahani). These sections extend the themes of fragmentation, intertextuality, and philosophical inquiry, situating the poets’ distinct voices within the shared architecture of the text. Ultimately, Letters of Lead is a study in co-presence: a poetic negotiation of identity, authorship, and the possibility of creative plurality in a fractured world.
Lady Gemini
Afra Publications, 2015
Lady Gemini marks the inception of my poetic voice and my first formal entry into the world of published literature. Composed during a period of inner reckoning and intellectual awakening, the collection explores the tensions between duality and fragmentation—between the seen and the silenced, the feminine and the political, the diasporic and the rooted. The title itself draws on astrological and symbolic resonances of Gemini as a sign of dual nature, echoing the layered selves I began to articulate through poetic form.
The collection experiments with fractured syntax, shifting registers, and intertextual gestures that resist closure. Drawing on Persian literary tradition while departing from its normative masculinities, Lady Gemini weaves a sensorial poetics—where the body, language, and longing entangle across time and memory. The poems trace the limits of voice in the face of censorship, patriarchy, and exile, forming a quiet yet defiant testament to the possibilities of expression under constraint.
