Laura Fitzgerald

Two stars is perhaps a little harsh, but I didn't really enjoy this at all. I've written a lot of confessional and autobiographical poetry over the years, some better than this but mostly worse, and reading this reminded me why I stopped. It's not the subject matter, per se. After all, all poetry is to some extent focused on the experience of the poet. Sylvia Plath, for example, is intensely self-referential, almost entirely focused on her own experience and feelings, and her work is sublime, beautiful, and moving. The trouble is that you need to be a fantastic poet to write beautifully and movingly on your on internal world. If you are not, the reader is not engaged, and experiences the various problems with poetic form. In this case, for example, the jarring contortions of metre in the first couple of poems. I was left wondering if there was any metre, or if the apparant use of metre was just an illusion, and I was searching for patterns where there were none. After a couple of poems I gave up.

I hope this doesn't appear cruel. I think that poetry is for everyone, that everyone should write poems about the things that they experience and feel. But very few people are good enough at it or have interesting enough internal lives that it makes for fun reading. I wonder if the author didn't go through the crushing hurt of having their teenage poetry sneered at, rejected, or worse, and was forced to consider what the difference was between their work and the work getting published. Like writing, poetry is an art that needs to be crafted. You need to read a lot of poetry and understand the different forms and techniques and then know why you use one rather than another to get the best words in the best order. Just writing your feels prettily is not always good poetry, though it can be good therapy, which is even more important!… (mehr)

Halfway though I realized that I had, without a doubt, read this book some years before. Not that I minded. It was a good re-read. I do have some concerns with the author's research on Persians and modern day Iran and I don't think all her assumptions are fair or accurate, but other that that I thought it was a good story and premise. A young Iranian woman comes to the United States in order to find a husband (her visa is only good for three months). She wants to escape the radical religious government and have freedom (unlike her parents who are trapped in Tehran). She stays with her sister and her husband and together they look for a suitable Persian American while she takes English classes at the local library. During the midst of this she meets a charming barista at Starbucks but she doesn't give him the time of day because he would never understand her predicament. Or would he?… (mehr)