White Blight

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida. This vital book exposes the dense tectonics churning beneath migrant dreams. Accusatory, loving, full of grief and sage truths, Athena Farrokhzad's WHITE BLIGHT speaks eloquently to the troubled inheritance of diasporic survival. Through a litany of terse voices, Jennifer Hayashida's sensitive translation describes the nexus of filial obligations and projections under which the narrator sinks from view. The intense beauty of devastation and the poignancy of betrayal emerge with startling frankness: 'Your family will never be resurrected like roses after a fire.' 'I have spent a fortune for your piano lessons / But at my funeral you will refuse to play.' These white lines make me ask, what has been bleached out in all of our stories? I read this book, and I remembered my humanity.--Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Translator bio: Poet, translator and visual artist Jennifer Hayashida was born in Oakland, CA, and grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco. She received her B.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and completed her M.F.A. in poetry from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is the recipient of awards from, among others, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. Recent translation projects include Ida B rjel's Miximum Ca'Canny The Sabotage Manuals you cutta da pay, we cutta da shob (Commune Editions, 2014) and Karl Larsson's FORM/FORCE (Black Square Editions, 2015); previous work includes Fredrik Nyberg's A Different Practice (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007), and Eva Sj din's INNER CHINA (Litmus Press, 2005). She is Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, The City University of New York.

Author: Athena Farrokhzad
Publisher: Argos Books
Published: 12/15/2015
Pages: 72
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.66lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.40w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781938247217


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/07/2016

About the Author
Farrokhzad, Athena: - Athena Farrokhzad was born in 1983 and lives in Stockholm. She is a poet, literary critic, translator, playwright and teacher. After several years of collaborative poetry projects and international literary work she published her first volume of poetry Vitsvit (WHITE BLIGHT) in 2013, at Albert Bonniers förlag. The book circles around the topic of revolution, war, migration and racism, and how these experiences condition the lives of different family members. Vitsvit received several literary awards and was/is being translated to different languages (Danish, Norwegian, Romanian, Spanish, Arabic, etc) and performed as a play at the Swedish Radio theatre and at Unga Klara theatre. Farrokhzad teaches creative writing at Biskops-Arnös författarskola, and has translated writers such as Adrienne Rich, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig and Nicole Brossard into Swedish. In 2015, her second volume of poetry, Trado, written together with the Romanian poet Svetlana Carstean, will be published.

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