Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths: Poems

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments These poems have been in making for the past five years. Chris Abani, Tony Barnstone, Elena Karina Byrne, Nathalie Handal, and Suzanne Roberts—I can’t thank you enough. I also wish to express my gratitude to Hamid Saeidi and the Farhang Foundation, who commissioned me to write a meditation on Nowruz, the Persian New Year, for a performance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in March 2012. The result of this effort was “Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths: A Nowruz Sonata in 7 Movements,” which closes this book. Many thanks to the staff and editors of the following publications in which some of the poems in this book, either in their present form or a variation thereof, have appeared: Guernica Magazine, The Warwick Review, Callaloo, Two Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Rumpus, Zacola Public Square, The Other Voices International, The Great River Review, The Atlanta Review, Connotation Press, The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles, Monstrous Poems, FrontLine’s Tehran Bureau, Voices [Education Project], The Kokanee, and Love and Pomegranates. And as always my immense gratitude goes to my editor, Larry Malley of the University of Arkansas Press, for his foresight, love of literature, and genuine interest in his authors. 79 ...