SOPHIA FALCO & FARNAZ FATEMI at Books Inc. Palo Alto

Join Sophia Falco and Farnaz Fatemi at Books Inc. Palo Alto for a reading and discussion of their books If My Hands Were Birds and Sister Tongue!

They will be joined in conversation with Allison Herman.

Praise for My Hands Were Birds:

“Sophia Falco is a born learner and seeker, as her very name suggests, questing after the wisdom of a psychic-spiritual order that will transform herself lastingly. The title of her award-winning new book, If My Hands Were Birds: A Poem, suggests this utter yearning for flight, for release into becoming little birds lost, doves or falcons in flight across heaven and earth. This long quasi-narrative poem holds these felt tensions of embodiment as well as a Buddhist-like release from the Pr*son-house (or bird cage) of flesh-meat into some airy creature of metamorphosis via sustained expression and a tender openness to change and future love. Poetry grounds and sustains these tensions, storms, and inner flux of mind and affect into achieved diary-like form, an ethos of creative activism and compassion, all elegantly and brilliantly collated daily as original poetry as in a state of renewed innocence, healing, and rebirth: for “my life was on the line” once again in these life-saving lines of poetry or like “a basketball in flight” as one last perfect shot.” —Rob Wilson is a poet-scholar who teaches in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz & author of When the Nikita Moon Rose as well as Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics.

"Sophia Falco wields her poetry as lamp and lance against the darkness that surrounds us all — claiming her place proudly within the ranks of poets past whose private lifelong struggles with mental illness, sexuality, and silence she both echoes and embodies (from Emily Dickinson to Allen Ginsberg to Mary Oliver). In doing so she achieves brief flights and flashes of an almost zen-like insight: graceful as the arc of a basketball at the buzzer; gentle as the rustle of hands over paper. Reaching “outwards instead of inwards” for “a way out of this / mind maze.” And finding it here within these pages.” —Dr. Scott Lankford, Professor of English (emeritus), Foothill College Stanford GEN Global Educators Network

“Sophia Falco’s If My Hands Were Birds is a poem that shines a light on things often left in the dark. With her willingness to lay bare her struggles with mental health, sexuality, identity, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma, Falco reaches “below the surface” of “fear, and more fear, and more fear” into a place of compassion to discover that “maybe hope lies on that tiny songbird’s wings.” This epic poem asks the reader to consider not only what poetry is, but what it can be—a “lifeboat on land.”” —Kaecey McCormick, author of Pixelated Tears and Sleeping With Demons

“Sophia Falco reminds us in her powerfully resonant, deeply affecting work that the game is meant not for the NBA, NCAA, or AAU but for the championship of our souls.” —David Hollander, New York University Professor, and Author How Basketball Can Save the World

“Falco's epic poem is at once emotional and expressive but wholly accessible to the reader. Drawing on personal experiences and relationships, Falco's autoethnographic observations about themes such as life, love, sexuality, and mental health - to name but a few - provide deep insight into her personal journey through self-development and -awareness.” —Marlen Elliot Harrison, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief, The AutoEthnographer

Sophia Falco's fourth, award-winning book of poetry, is titled: If My Hands Were Birds: A Poem is forthcoming soon in August 2024 to be published by UnCollected Press. Her third poetry book titled: Chronicles of Cosmic Chaos: In The Fourth Dimension (December, 2022) has been entered into the Northern California Book Awards; results pending. In addition, she is the author of: Farewell Clay Dove (2021), and of her award-winning chapbook The Immortal Sunflower (2019). She is the winner of the Mirabai Prize for Poetry, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she has over 50 individual poems published in various literary journals and magazines.

Sister Tongue:

The poems in Sister Tongue explore negative spaces—the distance between twin sisters, between lovers, between Farsi and English, between the poet’s upbringing in California and her family in Iran. This space between vibrates with loss and longing, arcing with tension. Fatemi’s poetry delves into the intricacies of the relational space between people, the depth of ancestral roots, and the visceral memories that shimmer beyond the reach of words.

Language is one of the origins of the poet’s displacement and the evidence of her non-belonging—in both Farsi- and English-speaking communities. The long lyric essay which makes up the spine of this book plumbs years of wordlessness and a journey of reconciliation, as Fatemi asks how her tongue might be a passport to the otherwise inaccessible territories within a self.

The poems in Sister Tongue metabolize longing while holding space for the poet’s multiple inheritances, offering a vision of a porosity of self. Through the work of this reckoning, Fatemi reveals how connections between people and places might be forged.

“Delicious, provocative, and incredibly wise, Farnaz Fatemi transcends years and oceans in these pages. Like gripping a cup and string to the ear, Sister Tongue is a hopeful missive, proof of words and their witnesses, an atlas of the wonder of becoming.”—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Poet Farnaz Fatemi is the soulful Iranian American truth-teller and wonder-wanderer we’ve needed to hear. In Farsi, in English, in Tehran, or California, these poems cherish the miracle of connectedness by weaving family threads through time and space—through sisters, mothers, grandmothers, through a changed and changing world. Sister Tongue is a luscious love letter to language(s), spoken in a trusting, intimate voice. The poet recognizes the twinned solace of silence and song, of sister and self. Loss takes its seat, as it does, at the table, and Fatemi, with tea, family history, powerful memory, and a new/old tongue, inscribes it alongside the depths of beauty and joy in this radiant book of passionate understanding.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum

“I praise the present tense of these poems for its tensile strength, its ability to hold the struggle that is happening in the past, present, and future. The way it speaks of the perpetual, of what it is to be tongue-tied in the presence of one’s other self. ‘Language is geological,’ this speaker tells us, ‘a process of accumulation, and accretion accompanied by landslides.’ In setting out to speak the language of her blood, she finds herself at once estranged and embraced. Thrilled and defeated. What to do with such a natural disaster? These poems persist in their attempts to bridge worlds, offering hope of a complex and hard-won reconciliation, one richly crafted line at a time. In the words of Fatemi, ‘I want the foreigner in me / to meet the foreigner in me.’”—Danusha Laméris, author of Bonfire Opera“

Sister Tongue, Farnaz Fatemi’s debut poetry collection, transports us to a place where language must stretch to fit the largeness of human love and longing, and in doing so, fills the absences we did not even know we harbored. Sister Tongue begins to say what many of us already know—that borders and countries are too limiting to define us. Her poems offer us both a reckoning and a salve.”—Persis M. Karim, chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University

“Neither exile nor immigrant, Farnaz Fatemi writes with a double intelligence that transcends any presuppositions we might bring to a poetry of the other. She claims her strategic advantage with confidence and laser-like insight, the gift of deep listening and the power of naming, as she slips back and forth freely across borders like a master spy reporting from an uncharted world suspended between two cultures. I am optimistic that Sister Tongue speaks the language of our future.”—Zara Houshmand, writer

“Thick with striking sensory detail and lingering images, "Sister Tongue" traces the narrator’s return to Tehran after 25 years abroad. It is lush and lamenting, returning again and again to the tongue, the mouth, the breath, considering both the power and constraints of language and the work of silence in family connections and the continuous shift of one’s sense of self. A truly gorgeous piece of writing.”—International Literary Awards, Penelope Niven Prize in Creative Non-Fiction 2018; Judge Seema Reza

"I am a sucker for any story that is a search for language--there's something beautiful about trying to find the words to say something while using a tongue that is familiar to us--to somehow write ourselves into a form of translating what we cannot understand. This piece, about overcoming being a stranger in a place where one should feel at home, is a beautiful examination of all of the words that we mispronounce.”—Kurt Brown Prize, 2017; Judge Brian Oliu

Farnaz Fatemi is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. Her book, , was chosen by Tracy K. Smith as winner of the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Sister Tongue was published by Kent State University Press on August 31, 2022. You can read her Poet Laureate blog, For Better or Verse, here.

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