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Wrong Person to Ask

Wrong Person to Ask

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Paperback / softback

£12.00

£10.80

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
ISBN: 9781780376394
Number of Pages: 80
Published: 19/10/2023
Width: 15.6 cm
Height: 23.4 cm

Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize. Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

I 13 Refuge 14 On seeing Iran in the news, I want to say 15 The Wrong Person to Ask 16 Two Grandmothers 17 Maman Bozorg 18 The gun in its holster 19 Riding the Line 20 The Game 21 Crossing the street for mother’s cigarettes 22 Shut Out the Noise 23 Packing for America 24 Hope 25 To the Airport 26 Origin 27 The Last Thing 28 Alarm I 29 Alarm II 30 I Picture of Girl and Small Boy (Burij, Gaza, 2014) 31 II Picture of Boy, Looking Away (Gaza, 2015) 32 Gabriella’s Dream 33 What You See in the Dark 34 Wishbone 35 Correction 36 Destruction of the Forty Martyrs Cathedral, Aleppo, Syria 37 Granddaughter, I entered your mother’s house 38 Checkpoint, Matveyev Kurgan 39 Khanoom 40 The End of the Road 40 i [There’s a moment every morning] 41 ii [Each breath in this place] 42 iii [Every blade against the cutting-board] 43 iv [She takes her boys back every summer] 44 v [Even in this lack of light, she sees] 45 vi [The boys carry her good looks] 46 vii [In her eightieth year, she sees her sisters] II 49 Sea Gooseberry (Pleurobrachia) 50 Sunday on the Luing Sound 51 Number 9 Cullipool 52 Sun?ower 53 Star of the Sea 54 Williamina Fleming 55 What Work Is 56 Omega Centauri 57 Drift 58 Say It’s Nothing, Say It’s Rust 59 Horizon 60 Out to Sea 61 When They Ask 62 The Trunk 63 After the Match 64 The ?rst thing he doesn’t forget 65 The Un?nished House 66 Storm Light 67 The Last Keeper 68 Citizen 69 Moving 70 And this is how it begins 71 O Love! 72 Edward Thomas on His Last Night with Helen 73 Keep 74 The Hebridean Crab Apple 76 Acknowledgements

Marjorie Lotfi

Marjorie Lotfi’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies in the UK and US (including The Rialto, Gutter, Ambit, Magma, Rattle and Staying Human), included in Best Scottish Poems 2021 and performed on BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio 4. Her pamphlet Refuge, poems about her childhood in revolutionary Iran, was published by Tapsalteerie Press in 2018. She has been the Poet in Residence at Jupiter Artland, Spring Fling and the Wigtown Book Festival, and was commissioned to write Pilgrim, a sequence about migration between Iran and the US, for the St Magnus Festival in Orkney. Marjorie also founded the Belonging Project, considering the experiences of refugees with over 1,500 participants across Scotland, and is a Co-Founder and Director of the charity Open Book. She is an Ignite Fellow with the Scottish Book Trust, one of the 12 Collective of women writers, and Deputy Chair of the board of StAnza, Scotland's International Poetry Festival. She was one of the three winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021, and her first book-length collection, The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

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