Nabood

A landmark bilingual collection by one of Iran's foremost contemporary poets, bearing witness to exile with remarkable lyric power and moral clarity.

Yeki bood, yeki nabood.

There was, and there was not.

So begin the old Persian fairy tales: with being already shadowed by its own erasure, with a world already split between presence and absence. In Nabood, Fatemeh Shams transforms that childhood formula into a grammar of exile. Nabood is an elegy for both what is no longer—the Iran Shams knew as a child, a father lost to Parkinson's disease, a fraying mother tongue—and what never was: a life unbroken by war and exile, womanhood and queerness unburdened by an oppressive regime. Marking Shams's first collection written in the United States, this bilingual edition bridges the liminal space between her birthplace in Iran and her life in exile. Her language twists and bends to accommodate this state of in-betweenness, where the physical body—once veiled, acid-burned, and interrogated under the Islamic Republic—must learn to carry its ghosts.

The poems trace a geographical and emotional diaspora, moving from the execution squares of Mashhad through the streets of Berlin, where brass cobblestones bear the names of deportees, before finding an uneasy footing in America. Yet the violence in Nabood is never confined to one place or one enemy. From the burning forests of California to the historical wounds of Auschwitz and Palestine, Shams confronts a global theater of atrocity, asking who profits and who mourns.

At the center stands a woman "as ancient as Scheherazade," telling her story with audacity and control. Fierce, intimate, and formally restless, Nabood is a testament to poetry's oldest power: to name what was, what was not, and what refuses to disappear.