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    Ghazal Games
    Poems

    Roger Sedarat (Author)

    9780821419502

    Paperback / softback, published 9 June 2011

    80 pages
    21.6 x 14 x 0.8 cm, 0.124 kg

    "In his new collection of poetry, Roger Sedarat strikes the perfect balance between Eastern and Western expression, between the modern and the medieval, and between the sacred and the profane. A delight on every page, one can't help but imagine that if Hafez, Rumi, and other Sufi mystic poets — even Goethe — were transported to the twenty–first century, their tweets might read something like this." "Roger Sedarat's Ghazal Games is an outstanding example of the genre." (Gino's Blog) "Playfully, humorously, Sedarat confronts issues such as religious hypocrisy and dogma head on…. Though Ghazal Games may appear a broadly experimental endeavor at first, its tone and carefully crafted phraseology remain consistent throughout. It is an excellent educational tool for creative writers and, as the following selections demonstrate, a delightful read." (Frontline, "Tehran Bureau") "These poems are to be savored in their audacity — in turn witty, erotic, ludic, learned, engaged. Roger Sedarat's ghazals bridge the form's (and the poet's) Persian sources to American demotic language, and open couplet windows on transnational reality."

    "Ghazal Games overflows with intelligent charm: its well-formed couplets, fueled
    by iconoclasm, are blessed with clarity, goodheartedness, pizzazz, and prankishness. Let's crown Roger Sedarat the king of Carnival; long may he reign."

    "Now more than ever, the world needs to hear from Roger Sedarat. Since his career began, he's been raging against oppressive regimes throughout the world, but his focus is Iran. He wants his work to help the Iranian people seize their country for their own. Sometimes this plays out in a symbolic way in his work, and sometimes in more literal fashion. He laments lost loved ones, lost human rights, and lost culture. He focuses his anger to a point and uses it to change people's minds." (Stuff for the Teen Age, a blog of The New York Public Library) "A unique and concise collection of interactive poems." (Persian Heritage)

    As an Iranian American poet, Roger Sedarat fuses Western and Eastern traditions to reinvent the classicalPersian form of the ghazal. For its humor as well as its spirituality, the poems in this collection can perhapsbest be described as "Wallace Stevens meets Rumi." Perhaps most striking is the poet's use of the ancient ghazal form in the tradition of the classical masters like Hafez and Rumi to politically challenge the Islamic Republic of Iran's continual crackdown on protesters. Not since the late Agha Shahid Ali has a poet translated the letter as well as the spirit of this form into English, using musicality and inventive rhyme to extend the reach of the ghazal in a new language and tradition.
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