Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths

About

Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, Sholeh Wolpé’s third collection of poems, is a surreal journey of sorrows and sins, of love, ghosts, and Saudi princes, of banishment inside one’s own skin. Wild in its leaps and images, these poems explore personal and psychological exile from a marriage, lovers, expectations, and finally, country.

Author

Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-American poet and playwright. Named a “2020-2021 Cultural Trailblazer” by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Wolpé is the recipient of the 2014 PEN/Heim, 2013 Midwest Book Award, 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize. Her most recent books include The Conference of the Birds and Let Me In. She is the translator of Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad. Wolpé’s literary work number over twelve collections of poetry, books of translations, and anthologies, as well as several plays . She is the Writer-in-Residence at UC Irvine. More information: www.sholehwolpe.com

Review

“A gifted Iranian-American poet beautifully explores love and the loss of love, beauty and war and the ghosts of the past.”

—Tom Lavoie in Shelf Awareness

Praise

“When Sholeh Wolpé asks in Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, ‘How hard is it to write a love song?’ she is reflecting on beauty and love in times of war and personal upheaval. She is reflecting on poetry’s absurd covenant with pain, loss, and violence—and its promise to find beauty through these human horrors. Her beautiful poems are at once sensual, meditative, raw in their honesty, and judicious in their fit use of language. This collection delights and disturbs, often in the very same poem.”
—Kwame Dawes, author of Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems

“Like dreams peopled with healing clues, Wolpe’s poems are rich with surrealism and harmony, telling deep truths of women across cultures and languages.”
—Annie Finch, author of Spells