Feast of the Ass

<p>Drawing extensively on Iranian poetic traditions and the history of their reception in English translation, <i>Feast of the Ass</i> presents a series of verses that play in the fields of love poetry’s address. Khajavi irreverently ruffles the “classical grandeur & quiet dignity” of inherited forms in order to consider the poet’s relationship to death, literature, race, religion, and sexuality, his “queer shoulder / set not to the wheel—so long, Solon!—but turned on to some bolder / axon.”</p>