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Forough Farrokhzad


Wikipedia spells her name Forugh Farrokhzad, pronounced FOR-ugh Far-ROHK-zad.

My paperback of Let Us Relive In The Beginning Of The Cold Season compares her to Shakespeare in a quote by Medhi Jami.

I hate to say this but I think Farrokhzad gives liberals a template on how to survive four years, to just enjoy your life. Dealing with female desire in Iran. She was sexual. This is a problem in present day Iran. She uses the confessional tone and moves towards the universal. 

Her quick biography is that she was married young, had a son and then divorced. Her husband won custody of her son, and she was depressed and got shock therapy. Triumph of the spirit, she fights on and continues, writing poetry books, directing a documentary, living her life. She tragically dies in a car accident at age 32. 

NYT: "After the overthrow of Iran’s secular monarchy in 1979, the Islamic Republic banned her poetry for almost a decade. But that censorship only elevated her appeal to new generations of Iranians, who saw Farrokhzad as a symbol of artistic, personal and sexual freedom."


Links:

NY Times profile: Iran’s leading literary journal, Sokhan, wrote after her funeral, “Forough is perhaps the first female writer in Persian literature to express the emotions and romantic feelings of the feminine gender in her verse with distinctive frankness and elegance, for which reason she has inaugurated a new chapter in Persian poetry.”

Website of her poems and more.

Controlled Burn by Rhian Sasseen.

Hillmann, M. (2022). Furūgh Farrukhzād. In Women Poets Iranica. Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation https://poets.iranicaonline.org/article/furugh-farrukhzad/

39 minutes audio BBC: Forugh Farrokhzad: A trailblazing voice for women in Iran.

Feminize your cannon: Forough Farrokhzad by Joanna Scutts in The Paris Review.

Book review in WSWS.

Book review in New York Review.

Book review in World Literature Today.

Sholeh Wolpé reads "I Pity the Garden" by Forugh Farrokhzad (YouTube).

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