A Long Drawn Face by Homa Zarghamee

What’s fascinating about these psychologically searching poems is that they consistently present the body in pieces, one of the many kinds of fragmentation and rupture–linguistic, familial, psychic, erotic, cultural–at the heart of this impassioned book. And yet, for all this, there’s beauty and rhythmic wholeness, a vitality in her search for what to make, to sound out of this elaborate puzzle, a fierce love for our breached and broken world. I look forward to where Homa Zarghamee’s poems will take us next.

–Donna Masini is a Professor of English and teaches poetry at CUNY Hunter College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.  Her poetry collections include Turning to Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2004) and That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994).

In A LONG DRAWN FACE, Homa Zarghamee writes, “I imagine dolphins being/the texture of tongue,” and “an angel faints off a cloud,” and “like the solar system of a tired god.” These alert and innovative poems challenge poetic complacency with their edgy brightness and breath-stopping gentleness. This poet writes globally “as a Child of Immigrants” and intimately as a troubled sleeper, a trained thinker, a gum chewer, a candy sucker, a tall, brown-eyed girl. Every poem in this beautiful collection is distinguished by refined imagery and highly focused language. Zarghamee offers us a riveting debut book.

–Margaret “Peggy” Ellsberg (PhD, Harvard University) teaches English at Barnard College. She is the author of Created to Praise: The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press, 1987) and The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections from His Poems, Letters, Journals, and Spiritual Writings (Plough, 2017), and an editor at Slapering Hol Press.  Her poetry has been published in The Peacock Journal.

In Homa Zarghamee’s brilliance of description, we find a dolphin like “the wet photograph of a face,” the “synovial honey” of snakes, a “stubborn clue” in lines of rain, all evocative of her classical mastery. Zarghamee’s work has a unique musical power that embodies and gives force to her subtle conceptions – whether they be of intimacy, the mystery of origins, inner and outer emigration, or the irrevocable fact of death. In many of these poems, her attention moves vertically, from earth to atmospheric air, metaphors for all the things that the poems air or give expression to with intricate beauty.

–Saskia Hamilton is a professor of English at Barnard College. Her poetry collections include Canal: New and Selected Poems (2005), Divide These (2005), and As for Dream(2001). She coedited Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008) with Thomas Travisano and edited The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005). Her work also appears in the anthology Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American (2010).