Fatemeh Shams’s third collection, When They Broke Down the Door, translated by Dick Davis, received the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award. She was recognized as one of the leading voices of exile when she won the Jaleh Esfahani poetry prize for the best young Iranian poet in 2012.
They had to remove it and off we went:
A transparent image of bones chained together;
Half face, three-quarters, full face of the fingers stretched out,
fingers without recognizable lines,
i…