Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic Review

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(More customer reviews)The publishing of poetry is and always should be the hallmark of the academic press. Such is the case with the Ohio University Press who has now made available to the reading public "Dear Regime", a collection of award winning verse by Roger Sedarat (Assistant Professor of English, Borough of Manhattan community College, City University of new York). Sedarat is the recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the St. Botolph Society poetry grant. His poetry has appeared in such prestigious journals as the 'New England Review', the 'Atlanta Review', and 'Poet Love'. Focusing his poetic skills upon themes and subjects associated with or arising from the culture of Iran, "Dear Regime" will aptly serve to introduce a whole new generation of readers to an articulate body of free verse and prose poetry that is as superbly crafted as it is memorable in both theme and substance. 'Picnic': Tea is to saffron as kneeling on the rug/is to a history of kings on the road/erecting tents, roasting lambs, etc.//Back in the city, who will free the prisoner/is to the guard as what is written/on papyrus is to ink.//When Haji goes to the park the ants arrive,/drawing a line from their mound/to the basket of fresh fruit and cutlet.//The ants are to analogies as cutlet/is to rhetoric. The exponential burden of laboring/bits of ground meat on tiny red bodies//thus makes a text worth eating./This is the story of Haji's hunger/read in the mountains on an April day.//It may indeed prove delightful/to put one's bare feet in a cold spring/after such an arduous climb.//Yet in the final analysis, it is only a test/of his verbal strength to view the city from the country/and try not to compare.

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In his provocative, brave, and sometimes brutal first book of poems, Roger Sedarat directly addresses the possibility of political change in a nation that some in America consider part of "the axis of evil." Iranian on his father\'s side, Sedarat explores the effects of the Islamic Revolution of 1979—including censorship, execution, and pending war—on the country as well as on his understanding of his own origins. Written in a style that is as sure-footed as it is experimental, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic confronts the past and current injustices of the Iranian government while retaining a sense of respect and admiration for the country itself. Woven into this collection are the author\'s vivid descriptions of the landscape as well as the people of Iran. Throughout, Sedarat exhibits a keen appreciation for the literary tradition of Iran, and in making it new, attempts to preserve the culture of a country he still claims as his own.

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