In Hopscotch, Fatemeh Shams crafts a vivid liminal world of Berlin-based poems, a canvas where home and exile blur into an intimate middle ground. Her work, geographically and metaphorically situated between her birthplace in Iran and her current life in exile, evokes a “third space”—a realm of creative liberation and a sanctuary for the play of memories, language, and space. Shams frames this space with tangible metaphors—airports, suitcases, the thresholds of nightclubs—and her poems, like the game of hopscotch itself, leap over borders with a childlike agility, contrasting against the harsh reality of exile. Shams’s poetry invites us to consider our own places of belonging and the potential spaces we inhabit—those rich intersections of language and lived experience.
Hopscotch
Fatemeh Shams
Translated by Armen Davoudian
May 2024
About the Author
Fatemeh Shams is the author of two books of poetry in Persian and a critical monograph in English on poetry and politics, A Revolution in Rhyme (Oxford UP). When They Broke Down the Door (Mage, 2016), a collection of her poems translated by Dick Davis, won the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award from the Association for Iranian Studies. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry magazine, PBS NewsHour, World Literature Today, and the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, among other venues. She is Associate Professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Praise
Poetry that makes the poet’s dictum resonate from the very first line is rare nowadays. Fatemeh Shams’s book of poems Hopscotch enables such experience, as she possesses power to name aphoristically the essence of what she says without much ado. This capacity endows her poetry with a special intonation—as if she were looking upon things from the epic distance, delicately wrapping pain into the ceremony of beauty and grace.
Keti Chukrov
In these gorgeous poems, a flaneuse wanders through a strange but historic city, reminiscing on exile and belonging and language. The voice is utterly alive, so full of verve and excitement, and the translations by Armen Davoudian are pristine. Fatmeh Shams possesses a rare talent—she is like the Frank O’Hara of Berlin. Hopscotch is my new favorite chapbook.
Aria Aber, author of Hard Damage
About the Translator
Armen Davoudian is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars. His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the 2020 Frost Place Competition. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.
Links
Poet Fatemeh Shams takes on politics in post-revolution Iran
When They Broke Down The Door: Poems
Episode 2: Fatemeh Shams, Armen Davoudian, Katherine Robinson, The Hopkins Review Podcast
Visiting Poet: Armen Davoudian on Fatemeh Shams: Five Poems
Nothing To Say: A discussion of three poems by Fatemeh Shams
PBS NewsHour Introduces Fatemeh Shams’s When They Broke Down The Door
Poetry, passion, politics: translator Dick Davis and the poems of Fatemeh Shams
Publication Details
Chapbook
32 pp, 4 x 7.125 in
Publication Date: May 01 2024