Kaveh Bassiri

Kaveh Bassiri is an Iranian-American writer and translator, who was born in Tehran and came to United States as a teenager. He is the author of two chapbooks, 99 Names of Exile (2019), winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and Elementary English (2020), winner of Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Bassiri is the recipient of a 2022-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellowship, 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council, 2020 Artist 360 Grant sponsored by the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in a number of anthologies and textbooks, including Best American Poetry 2020, Best New Poets 2020, The Heart of a Stranger (2020), Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (2021), Somewhere We Are Human (2022), A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers (2022), and Without a Doubt (2023). They can also be found in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, Nimrod International Journal, The Cincinnati Review, and Shenandoah.

ELEMENTARY ENGLISH BY KAVEH BASSIRI
$10.00

WINNER OF THE 2019 RICK CAMPBELL CHAPBOOK AWARD

 Kaveh Bassiri’s Elementary English is a profound meditation on the urgencies of language, a confirmation that “the word remembers:’ It is a resonant bearing of witness, in a world where “272 million people are international migrants.” It is, in its loving remembrance of the grandmother who “became my first relative buried in the USA;” a transformation of loss into gift. “She begins again in someone else:” Elementary English affirms, and that someone else is the reader of Kaveh Bassiri’s wise and beautiful book.      — H. L. Hix 

What is it possible to say in English? Which poetic forms can be adapted to new truths? This book is exciting, not only because of its subjects and themes, but because Kaveh Bassiri is so adventurous in the way he stretches language, structure, and form. Only a poet with a rich vocabulary and healthy skepticism of English itself could have managed the feat.      —Kazim Ali

ELEMENTARY ENGLISH BY KAVEH BASSIRI $10.00