From the Blog

10 Questions for Salar Abdoh

January 21, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

My mother does not know a lot of things, and yet she remembers many things. When I tell her over the phone that I am thinking of learning how to sail a boat, she does not ask how it is that I could do something like this in Tehran, a city far from the sea [...]
—from "Hoor-Al-Azim," by Maryam Haidari, Translated by Salar Abdoh

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I seriously got into translation after Akashic Books asked me to edit and translate Tehran Noir, a volume in their remarkable series of noir collection from major cities around the world.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Looking back, probably the writer who had the most consistent...

Birdsong

January 20, 2022 - By Keith Taylor

Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows (The Word Works, 2021).

Shelley begins his famous, “To a Skylark”: “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert. . .” Then for the next few stanzas he works hard to show the “birdiness” of the bird, until he finally gives up in a series of similes (“Like a Poet hidden/In the light of thought . . .”; “Like a high-born maiden/In a palace tower. . .” etc.). By the end of the poem Shelley wants to learn to sing with the bird’s “harmonious madness” so the “world should listen” to him as attentively as he listens to the bird. He’s yet...

10 Questions for Maryam Haidari

January 19, 2022 - By Salar Abdoh and Edward Clifford

My mother does not know a lot of things, and yet she remembers many things. When I tell her over the phone that I am thinking of learning how to sail a boat, she does not ask how it is that I could do something like this in Tehran, a city far from the sea [...]
—from "Hoor-Al-Azim," by Maryam Haidari, Translated by Salar Abdoh

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In 2012 I was traveling north from Beirut to Tripoli. It was the first time I was in Lebanon and I was determined to see my friend up in Tripoli. But ISIS had already crossed over from the Syrian border into the north of Lebanon. My Lebanese friends forbade me to go, saying that if ISIS found out I was Iranian they would surely kill me. I went nevertheless....

Five Lessons Peter Bogdanovich Taught Me About Art (And Life)

January 18, 2022 - By Michael Dunaway

Peter Bogdanovich passed away this week of natural causes. He was one of the great American directors, of course. His three picture run of The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc, and Paper Moon has seldom been equalled, and although his work after that (without his brilliant collaborator Polly Platt) was uneven, it contained some great work unjustly overlooked by critics and fans who adopted an easy narrative about his decline. He was a genius. He never stopped being a genius. That’s evident not only in his films, but also in his criticism, his interviews, his documentaries, and his curation.

He was also my friend. We met at a film festival and immediately hit it off. His multi-hyphenate career lined up nearly exactly with what I was trying to...

10 Questions for CAConrad

January 14, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

My last (Soma)tic poetry ritual, “Resurrect Extinct Vibration,” used audio field recordings of animals who have become extinct in my lifetime. The ritual momentarily returned the music of the disappeared back to the air, the body, and the land.
—from Ignition Chronicles, Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
My first poem is from 1975. My mother began making me sell bouquets of flowers along the highway, and it turned me into a reader. Think about that year 1975; absolutely nothing digital in our hands to distract us. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday became many hours of forced isolation for me, and reading was the solution.

One Thursday, when I was at the library getting...