White Blight - Athena Farrokhzad

Poetry. Translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida. This vital book exposes the dense tectonics churning beneath migrant dreams. Accusatory loving full of grief and sage truths Athena Farrokhzad's WHITE BLIGHT speaks eloquently to the troubled inheritance of diasporic survival. Through a litany of terse voices Jennifer Hayashida's sensitive translation describes the nexus of filial obligations and projections under which the narrator sinks from view. The intense beauty of devastation and the poignancy of betrayal emerge with startling frankness: 'Your family will never be resurrected like roses after a fire.' 'I have spent a fortune for your piano lessons / But at my funeral you will refuse to play.' These white lines make me ask what has been bleached out in all of our stories? I read this book and I remembered my humanity. Sueyeun Juliette Lee Translator bio: Poet translator and visual artist Jennifer Hayashida was born in Oakland CA and grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco. She received her B.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley and completed her M.F.A. in poetry from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is the recipient of awards from among others the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council the New York Foundation for the Arts PEN the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation the Jerome Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. Recent translation projects include Ida Borjel's Miximum Ca'Canny The Sabotage Manuals you cutta da pay we cutta da shob (Commune Editions 2014) and Karl Larsson's FORM/FORCE (Black Square Editions 2015); previous work includes Fredrik Nyberg's A Different Practice (Ugly Duckling Presse 2007) and Eva Sjodin's INNER CHINA (Litmus Press 2005). She is Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College The City University of New York.