Tehrangeles by Sanam Shahmiri

Blending visceral lyricism and investigative poetry into a wholly original chapbook, Sanam Shahmiri explores the unique collision of Iranian and American culture in her debut work Tehrangeles. Named for the area of LA also known as Little Persia where up to one million Iranian Americans reside, these poems interrogate how cultures blend and depict contrasting perspectives between oppressor and oppressed. In poems that juxtapose historic events like the 2009 Iranian election protests that claimed the life of Neda Agha-Soltan with coming-of-age experiences in an America where the speaker’s identity as a woman and a Iranian are under constant scrutiny and threat, Tehrangeles elicits a dark sense of foreboding that evokes the contemporary moment with brio. These poems evoke the unsettling cultural betweenness that only the child of immigrants can grasp, while also setting alight the persistent expectations of societal norms, imbuing the poems with both a profound sense of mourning and search for the freedom to belong.