Description:
The speaker in Iranian-American poet Leila Farjami's debut collection, Daughter of Salt, fiercely engages with and questions her mother, her father, ancestors, and herself. Patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and displacement swirl together, colored by the frustration at being expected to hold it all together for everyone else: A daughter made of salt-a dead sea to keep bodies afloat. Throughout, the daughter vacillates between rebellion, acceptance, and empathy, searching for healing from a childhood marked by war and violence. This collection moves the reader into remembrance and healing; the preservation and renewal of the self that occurs when grace is given to others and ourselves, when we allow ourselves to keep close the memories we share with those we have lost, and use them to build a foundation for a better future.
Brief description: Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist. She has received The Iowa Review Award in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review's Schiff Award, and a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, and was runner-up for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Her work has also been recognized as a finalist for prizes from Pleiades, Noemi Press, Perugia Press, and Southern Indiana Review. A Pushcart nominee, her poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, Swamp Pink, AGNI, The Cincinnati Review, The Mississippi Review, Southern Indiana Review, among others. She lives in Los Angeles. Her work can be followed at leilafarjami.com and @leila_poetry.
Review Quotes:
"In this sharp-tongued, crystalline debut, Leila Farjami traces, mourns, and remakes an inheritance of womanhood waterlogged with duty and self-erosion. Mythic and matrilineal in scope, Daughter of Salt plumbs the secrets of sand and sea, mother and daughter, nation and body. I could feel an ancestor's deft hand guiding me through these haunting, evocative poems-language by Farjami's hand is a gill net, and nothing, not great beauty or harrowing pain, slips through unnoticed."
-Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of Theophanies
"In her sweeping, astonishing debut collection, Leila Farjami'spoems cross continents & oceans & document both lineage & war. In this cartography of memory, loss & endurance, Farjami's poems span her Iranian childhood, her family's migration to the U.S. & her experiences as a diasporic woman living with the hauntings of complex trauma. Farjami's voice isthe sound of never drowning yet never arriving on land & her poems are artifacts of survival. When a woman tells the truth & claims space for her story & for her life, she makes room for the rest of us to do the same-she speaks her name / and walls make way. These poems move the way an ancient river moves over rocks-expansively, determinedly & without fear. Daughter of Salt is one of those rare, potent & luminous books-one that reminds me why I love poetry & why the world, in all of its cruelty & beauty, still needs it."
-Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms & Night Swim
"Leila Farjami has constructed a new creation myth with Daughter of Salt. Here, a mother might carve an apple into a half moon, might bend the wind with her will, and carry us past bloodshed into bone-memory. Here, daughters are salt of the earth and sea, made from mourning and dawn. Many of these poems teeter on the precipice of juxtaposition, pairing death with beauty, reverence with grace. Farjami warns us that we grow into ourselves, despite our living and loss, acknowledges her own fate: 'I am the ghost/ of women turned fire: // I warm the dead.'Can the poet be a balm for spirits? Have the progeny imagined their suffering? Have they dreamt death clinging, or all the blue covering edge of earth and smoke-filled wartime sky? No. The mothers have aged and hollowed, their homeland is hazy light, but every bridge is absolute. Even when walking away might be the only salvation, the poet will bring to light what is most daunting, heaped like rubble or a mound of salt, turning."
-Remica Bingham-Risher, author of What We Ask of Flesh and Room Swept Home