The 2009 presidential elections in Iran brought the struggles of the Iranian people home to a new generation of Americans. The protests, while taking place in far away Tehran and other cities across the country, were transmitted in real time through intimate technologies that could not be silenced. Americans were shown a side of Iran – its human side – that few people outside of the Iranian-American community recognized or understood before the controversial declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election. The green wave of free speech evident on faces like ours was palpable, and by the time the footage of Neda Agha-Soltan’s killing reached the world’s Inbox, many people understood again, or for the first time, that the struggle for freedom in the world is very much alive.

Poetry, too, exists in the periphery of the American consciousness, yet it provides unique opportunities for understanding the lives of people in other countries. The work of Los Angeles based poet Sholeh Wolpé is an exceptional example of this. Wolpé, who was born in Iran and spent most of her teen years in the Caribbean and Europe, is the author of Sin – Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (University of Arkansas Press) and The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press). Her most recent book is Rooftops of Tehran, and as the title suggests, she offers a top down view of life inside and in relation to Iran. While not all of the poems in the book focus specifically on controversial subjects, it is the most contentious poems that make this book particularly important right now.

Rooftops of Tehran is a book of contrasts and commonalities. Iran and the West, men and women, violence and sensual tenderness: each is brought into focus by a “speck of a girl” now writing as a woman reflecting on her origins and the cultures that helped shape her. Some of the poet’s language is lightly inferred, but some cuts like a razorblade. In “Rain, Rain All Week” an elderly neighbor complains about the weather until the sun emerges and she is transformed into “the girl she must have been years ago before she was lost / to this city of men, rough hands and veils.” In “Stoning the Prostitute” one girl is “slapped away from harm” while another is “slapped into it, her legs forced wide from age eight to eighteen and now… Let the sinner get what she deserves.”

“The Men, Plural” is perhaps the most confrontational poem in the book:  

At night they come in masks and hoods,
in fatigues, in paint, with guns and swords,
machetes, blades, flags of stars,
of stripes, with crosses, with crescents, and skulls,
they march, they sneak, they whisper, they shout
they threaten, they plunge and bust and lunge,
into hearts, into groins, into girls, they come,
they fist, they smack, they grin, they grin.

This poem speaks directly to the brutal treatment of women around the world in places as diverse as the Middle East, the Congo, Darfur, Bosnia, and Chechnya (to name a few). The poet is clear in her choice of symbols – blades, crosses, crescents – to broaden accountability in an affront to perpetrators of gender-based violence everywhere.

Sholeh Wolpé is defined by many places, cultures, and perspectives. Rooftops of Tehran bridges the poet’s Western and Iranian selves, but in light of the international political climate and recent events, perhaps not enough. The ability to know a place and observe it from afar is unique and not lost on the poet; however, in light of the international political climate the relevance of Rooftops of Tehran demands that Wolpé continue to maintain her role as representative, proponent, and participant by continuing to broaden the world’s view of Iran. That her poems have achieved such relevance is admirable, but with this success an enormous responsibility is bestowed. Her book, which felt complete when it was first published, now feels like just the beginning of a lifetime of poetic advocacy.

In Rooftops of Tehran Sholeh Wolpé condemns injustices through the highlighted experiences of others – especially women – by bringing into focus realities that are difficult to comprehend even from the safe distance of Anchorage, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, or London. Wolpé walks an internal-external tightrope that is made all the more powerful when held against the tidal tensions between Washington and Tehran. But the context is impossible to ignore, and largely because of the beauty Sholeh Wolpé draws from within it, Rooftops of Tehran is an uncommon achievement in contemporary American poetry – it is a book that actually matters.

Word Count: 754