‘A Small Redirection, a Way of Making Space’
in conversation with Ghazal Mosadeq

In my hallway lives a scarlet card with white calligraphy. Across or within the Persian script, without disruption, is smaller black Roman script:

Words of the sovereign are the darkness of Yalda nights
Hāfez of Shiraz, 1315–1390

The following conversation is with the card’s sender, Ghazal Mosadeq. Her new collection, The Book of Advice (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2026) continues the established Persian literary genre of Andarznama. The English text resembles an erasure poem from a verse drama, or a sparse but rich open field. It glints with devastating humour, poised between ‘still’ and ‘again’. It is accessible, via an I who tries to be good in any time or place – but who also strays across every time and sits inside the window of any place. It skewers the pretensions of a poet in a beanie, shares the parable of Ibn Sina’s donkey, forgets the friend’s name while remembering the friend. A recurrent image is of the person who suddenly gives a ‘clear look’, though eyes are the receptors of light, and looks are unreadable. My experience of Ghazal herself is of just such occasional lightning looks, followed by unfailingly thoughtful utterance.

Anthony: In the way of ‘poetry family’, we have met in many places over the years, including Inishbofin, in the west of Ireland. Unsurprisingly, you were not the first person to have recited in Persian on that faery island. Tell me about you as a poet and translator, and your practice – how might terms like ‘material’, ‘visual’, ‘language’, ‘silence’, ‘avant-garde’ and ‘heritage’ fit?

Ghazal: I remember when we ...