Fatemeh Shams

May 1, 2024 | poetryfoundation.org | Fatemeh Shams |Armen Davoudian |Janani Ambikapathy

Fatemeh Shams is a Persian poet and scholar, whose chapbook, Hopscotch, translated by Armen Davoudian, traces the uncanny route of an Iranian exile through Berlin: I walk in you beside Picasso’s women, their shattered faces past the swans and dismal mice of the Landwehrkanal on an ex-Bolshevik sidewalk clad in black leather, a full-time loner In the titular poem, the chalk lines on the street behave like a boundary between the present and the past—with each hop, the prospect of reaching...