Armen Davoudian’s debut poetry collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars, tells the story of a self estranged from the world around him as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America. It is a story darkened by the long shadow of global tragedies — the Armenian genocide, war in the Middle East, the specter of homophobia. In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars, but reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of the book’s twenty poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, the image of a lost home.

In Hopscotch, Fatemeh Shams crafts a liminal world of Berlin-based poems, a canvas where home and exile blur into an intimate middle ground. Her work, geographically and metaphorically situated between her birthplace in Iran and her current life in exile, evokes a “third space,” a realm of creative liberation and a sanctuary for the play of memories, language, and space. Her poems, like the game of hopscotch itself, leap over borders with a childlike agility, contrasting against the harsh reality of exile.

Armen Davoudian is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House, US; Corsair, UK) and the translator, from Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams (Ugly Duckling Presse, US; Falscrhum, Germany). He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.

POEMS

Facing Pages, Poetry

Saffron, The Atlantic

Coming Out of the Shower, Literary Matters

TRANSLATIONS

Handwriting by Fatemeh Shams, Poetry

Swan Song by Mehdi Hamidi Shirazi, Literary Matters

Three poems by Sohrab Sepehri, Waxwing

ON POETRY

“Robert Frost: Poems in Books, Poems Against Books,” Modern Philology

“Alliteration,” Harriet, Poetry Foundation

Interview, Academy of American Poets