HOPSCOTCH
By Fatemeh Shams
Translated by Armen Davoudian
Ugly Duckling Presse

In Hopscotch, Fatemeh Shams crafts a vivid liminal world of Berlin-based poems, a canvas where home and exile blur into an intimate middle ground. Her work, geographically and metaphorically situated between her birthplace in Iran and her current life in exile, evokes a “third space”—a realm of creative liberation and a sanctuary for the play of memories, language, and space. Shams frames this space with tangible metaphors—airports, suitcases, the thresholds of nightclubs—and her poems, like the game of hopscotch itself, leap over borders with a childlike agility, contrasting against the harsh reality of exile. Shams’s poetry invites us to consider our own places of belonging and the potential spaces we inhabit—those rich intersections of language and lived experience.

Fatemeh Shams is the author of two books of poetry in Persian and a critical monograph in English on poetry and politics, A Revolution in Rhyme (Oxford UP). When They Broke Down the Door (Mage, 2016), a collection of her poems translated by Dick Davis, won the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award from the Association for Iranian Studies. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry magazine, PBS NewsHour, World Literature Today, and the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, among other venues. She is Associate Professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.