Face to Face With Dreams - Tapa blanda

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. Translated from the Farsi by Parisa Samadi. The first English-language translation of Ziaeddin Torabi's Iran Book of the Year award- winning FACE TO FACE WITH DREAMS, presented in a beautiful facing-page Farsi/English edition.

"Ziaeddin Torabi's remarkable poetry happens at the intersection of the dreamed and the real. In one poem, mythic snakes 'have grown on your shoulder.' In another, a tree having dropped its leaves 'can be gallows / or a light pole.' In another, the human heart is a grenade. Confident, imaginative, clear-eyed, self-effacing, Torabi convinces us of the reality of his fiercely imagined worlds and takes us deeply into our own. FACE TO FACE WITH DREAMS is a literary feast."—Greg Glazner

"What a thrill for the world to get the gift of Ziaeddin Torabi. A beloved Iranian bard and scholar, Torabi tints many old and new worlds, classical and contemporary, in his singular style and vision. FACE TO FACE WITH DREAMS is a gorgeous, heartbreaking, strange, ecstatic collection."—Porochista Khakpour

"Here, in Torabi's poems, simple and direct language conveys the emotional complexity of human everyday drama. Moving forward through the pages, one finds in Torabi's fragmentary poetic narratives, the long deep structures of the self. People shuffle through the incomplete day, losing and finding themselves amid the collateral events of a broken world. Refreshing, earnest work in a time of demasiado irony. You can feel the emotional depth way down in your guts."—Daniel Rounds

Ziaeddin Torabi was born in Zanjan, Iran. After he completed elementary and high school, he continued his education in English Language and literature and graduated with a BA in 1970 from the Faculty of Letters of Isfahan University. He resumed his education in linguistics and received his MA from Tehran University. He started composing and reciting poems in childhood, and his first poetry collection of free verse was published in 1970. He has published more than 30 books in different areas, such as poetry, criticism, and translation. He has won a number of literary awards, among them the Iran Annual Book Prize in 2010 for FACE TO FACE WITH DREAMS.