What grabbed me at first was the title, but then picking up Roger Sedarat's Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, I found this collection contains 71 pages of courageous, and at times shocking poems. Some of them are side-splittingly funny, as in a poem titled "Athletes Make the Best Persian Pornography." The poem opens with:

Dear Regime: Letters to the Iranian RepublicReza Goes Bowling. Banned in Iran as a sport
for its obvious sexual suggestions,
watch close-ups of this young man (who looks very much
like a Persian singer in this blue sequined suit)
putting three fingers in a red ball.

Or in another poem "Satellite of Love," where:

The butcher's wife, because her husband gets HBO,
would complain about 9½ Weeks, her having
to pour last night's fesenjan and rice over her body.

In Agha D- Sedarat begins his poem humorously, but soon the shock of what he is saying is like a punch delivered with masterful timing:

When I meet the literary historian of a nation,
he's writing a book in his underwear,

cutting and pasting the faces of poets
into ruler-drawn boxes.

As he holds each black-and-white face before me,
he slices his throat with his index finger...

I agree with poet Kimiko Hahn that in this collection of poems, "Roger Sedarat mixes the surreal with the actual in a poetic landscape that is as terrifying as it is stunning. Humor here is complicated by very real and current imagery: the woman who washes women before their execution, a plague of moths, blindfolds, a bowl of fire."

I am happy to present to you two poems from this stunning collection, winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize.

Enjoy,
Sholeh Wolpé, LR poetry editor

Roger Sedarat, American Iranian poetMore About Roger Sedarat
Roger Sedarat is the author of Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Repubic, which won Ohio University Press's Hollis Summers' Prize, and Ghazal Games (Ohio UP, 2011). In addition to teaching creative writing (poetry and literary translation) in the MFA program at Queens College, City University of New York, he teaches and writes on such academic interests as 19th and 20th century American literature as well as Middle Eastern-American literature. Currently, Roger is working toward translating a full-length collection of ghazals by the 14th century Sufi Persian poet, Hafez. Visit his site.