Linda Scheller has reviewed Sholeh Wolpé’s Abacus of Loss: A Memoir in Verse in The Colorado Review.
“When circumstances change, we change,” Scheller writes. “As with any organism, a human’s survival is predicated on homeostasis, the processes of self-regulating stabilization. In addition to our physiological adjustments, we must also adapt psychologically to altered conditions. Some changes create extraordinary imbalance: the death of a loved one, a debilitating accident, the loss of one’s homeland. Exiled from Iran as a teenager, the poet, playwright, and translator Sholeh Wolpé asks, “What is a transplanted tree / but a time being / who has adapted to adoption?” Her remarkable new memoir in verse, Abacus of Loss, chronicles a life in which difficult changes are weighed against the acquisition of agency.”
Sheller concludes, “Sholeh Wolpé’s Abacus of Loss is a brave, honest, and wise accounting of the inherent worth of a woman’s life and her magnificent power to adapt and thrive.”
Read the full review online at The Colorado Review.
Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian American poet, translator, and playwright. She is the award-winning author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, and The Conference of the Birds. Currently a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine, Wolpé has lived in Iran, Trinidad, and the United Kingdom. She presently resides in Los Angeles and Barcelona.