Granny Cloud

Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781681378596
Pages: 112
Publication Date: September 24, 2024

The fantastical and strange second collection from Farnoosh Fathi evokes André Breton’s surrealism and the linguistic playfulness of Gertrude Stein.... Enthusiasts of formal innovation and linguistic play will savor this astonishing volume.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Specializing in moments of linguistic collision, Fathi, in just a few deft syllables, can trigger a riot of associations and sonic improvisations that extend beyond the ironic, beyond belletristic distractions, into the nuanced tonal inflections of a self and culture auscultated.
—Christine Hume, Boston Review

Giggle in recognition and then faint as you’re wrecked (the arc of reading Granny Cloud). These poems (long, long awaited, so, so long! Shut the door!) appeal to my own appeal for (1) impossible, dripping, not-mental satisfaction in the espaliering, then escaped-plant word-scars that are poetry’s forte when penned in servitude-angles of perception: “it appears I feed myself from behind”; and (2) some opposite, some “soft spot” for grinding rehearsals of return, regress, repeat, renew. Farnoosh Fathi is looking for a most vulgar self-satisfaction in writing... “What others rule operatic was for me finally accurate!” “If only I could unite myself with what I write!” “My legs espalier”; “No one who means it knows it.” The comparisons are discontent. These are horological poems. They appeal to life’s cycles, to Fathi’s—may we mimic her dashes who know when to sublimate grammatical rulers so that the sun might cross the sand of its line—Farnoosh’s own greatness.
—Corina Copp

Ah, “what have I done in my able meter?”, a drily dismayed Farnoosh Fathi asks herself. A jubilant lot, I’d say, with her hummingbird fingers working her readers into perfect "thwarts of explication." How much I find to relish in her popped buttons becoming blackberries hopping in this “kind of worsted novel,” reminiscent at once of Lewis Carroll and of Apollinaire singing to his Annie, (“ses rosiers et ses vêtements n’ont pas de boutons”). Poetry too radically rambunctious, too linguistically lubricious to be defined by even her, let alone by this admiring “ogre kissing guesses”—who can, however, declare enthusiastically that she deserves as wide an audience as possible, especially among the extravagant.
—Stephen Yenser

Poetry, like the humors, like the soul, can be grasped only when its exuberance exceeds the body. Granny Cloud is that exuberance, thus illustrating the impossibility of finding form. This book is the Tower of Babel for our generation! The poems wander off the page, and walk, as Saint Francis did, to call to birds. And the sprite voice of the poet calls me to attention, to the penetralia of reality, and to new ways of reading, as words are eternally reunited with their bodies. With their birds and clouds!
—Darcie Dennigan