27 Marjan Street

The rooms shrink down with each new coat of paint.
The house stays calm. The child inside the house
is also calm, face tucked into mother’s blouse,
but the rooms shrink down with each new coat of paint.

Though the house is gone, the walls will not relent.
No more a child, at every new impasse,
you shrink the rooms with coat on coat of paint
to a house inside that child inside that house.

Reviews in the Cleveland Review of Books, Echolocations, the Irish Times, the Sunday Times, The Telegraph, and elsewhere.

Translation

In the beginning was translation
…
this body
spun anew
covering yourself
with a stranger’s skin
to write with another’s hand
in another hand.

Reviews in Poetry and Words Without Borders

Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House, US; Corsair, UK), which won the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and was long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.

POEMS

Facing Pages, Poetry

Saffron, The Atlantic

Coming Out of the Shower, Literary Matters

TRANSLATIONS

Fatemeh by Fatemeh Shams, Poetry

On Translating Fatemeh Shams, Poetry

Swan Song by Mehdi Hamidi Shirazi, Literary Matters

ON POETRY

“Robert Frost: Poems in Books, Poems Against Books,” Modern Philology

“Alliteration,” Harriet, Poetry Foundation

Interview, Academy of American Poets