Rooftops of Tehran

Sholeh Wolpe

Sholeh Wolpe’s Rooftops of Tehran is that truly rare event: an important book of poetry. Brushing against the grain of Persian-Islamic culture, she sings a deep affection for what she ruffles. Her righteous aversion to male oppression is as broad as the span from Tehran to LA, as deep as a wise woman’s heart. This is a powerful, elegant book.

—Richard Katrovas, author of The Years of Smashing Bricks and Prague Winters

These poems (in Rooftops of Tehran) confirm the positive reaction that I have had to Sholeh Wolpé’s work--the irrepressible originality, the insouciant wit, the occasional stabs of pain, the fearless honesty, the instant evocation of a time and a place are all here in an enjoyable and endearing mix. Brava!

--Amin Banani, Professor Emeritus of Persian and History, UCLA

“A stark and wondrous journey through and beyond the worlds looming on top of the aching roofs of Tehran, the poems in this collection are as vibrant as they are brave. Sholeh Wolpé poetry proves to be rumination, prayer, song. This book is an irresistible unrest. "  

 —Nathalie Handal, author of Love and Strange Horses and co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond

In Sholeh Wolpe’s Rooftops of Tehran, an unforgettable cast of characters emerges, from the morality policeman with the poison razor blade to the crow-girls flapping their black garments, from the woman with the bee-swarm tattoo emerging from her crotch to the author as a young girl on a Tehran rooftop with a God’s eye view “hovering above a city / where beatings, cheating, prayers, songs, / and kindness are all one color’s shades.”  Here is a delicious book of poems, redolent of saffron and stained with pomegranate in its vision of Iran and of the immigrant life in California.  Wolpe’s poems are at once humorous, sad and sexy, which is to say that they are capriciously human, human even in that they dream of wings and are always threatening to take flight.

—Tony Barnstone, author of Tongue of War and The Golem of Los Angeles