Fatemeh Shams’s third collection, When They Broke Down the Door, translated by Dick Davis, received the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award. She won the Jaleh Esfahani poetry prize for the best young Iranian poet in 2012.
Illustration by Elyas Alavi from the series Waking DreamsTranslator’s note: Few voices are more distinctive in the world of contemporary Afghan poetry than Elyas Alavi. The...
They had to remove it and off we went:
A transparent image of bones chained together;
Half face, three-quarters, full face of the fingers stretched out,
fingers without recognizable lines,
i...