Queer Iranian love poems from an expat writer in Italy.

Drawing extensively on Iranian poetic traditions and the history of their reception in English translation, Feast of the Ass presents a series of verses that play in the fields of love poetry's address. Khajavi irreverently ruffles the "classical grandeur & quiet dignity" of inherited forms in order to consider the poet's relationship to death, literature, race, religion, and sexuality, his "queer shoulder / set not to the wheel--so long, Solon!--but turned on to some bolder / axon."

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies.