Sister Tongue
“In Sister Tongue, Fatemi shines gorgeous light on the liminal space between languages, bearing witness to the joy and longing that accompany every act of translation.”
—Tracy K. Smith, from the Foreword
The poems in Sister Tongue explore negative spaces—the distance between twin sisters, between lovers, between Farsi and English, between the poet’s upbringing in California and her family in Iran. This space between vibrates with loss and longing, arcing with tension. Fatemi’s poetry delves into the intricacies of the relational space between people, the depth of ancestral roots, and the visceral memories that shimmer beyond the reach of words.
Language is one of the origins of the poet’s displacement and the evidence of her non-belonging—in both Farsi- and English-speaking communities. The long lyric essay which makes up the spine of this book plumbs years of wordlessness and a journey of reconciliation, as Fatemi asks how her tongue might be a passport to the otherwise inaccessible territories within a self.
The poems in Sister Tongue metabolize longing while holding space for the poet’s multiple inheritances, offering a vision of a porosity of self. Through the work of this reckoning, Fatemi reveals how connections between people and places might be forged.
Reviews and Interviews
Interview with Nowruz Journal
“For me the obvious lesson I’ve learned from being a poet and from being someone who has made efforts to learn languages is that the world might, finally, be untranslatable. And yet the pursuit—an attempt to understand—can be a space and source of great beauty.” Spring 2023
Interview with Christopher Nelson
“How I am a poet emerges from how I learned to be a sister who is a twin.” Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue #13, June 2022.
Interview with The Hive Poetry Podcast
Julie Murphy and Farnaz Fatemi discuss longing, language, loss, identity, food and sisterhood as they weave through the remarkable poems in this collection. Sept 2022
Interview with Christina Waters. Good Times, Santa Cruz
★ Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review
"Fatemi makes language think aloud and sing in these ruminative, beautiful poems." June 2022
World Literature Today Review
“… gorgeous poetry that brings an unexpected understanding to those hyphenated identities…creating a sense of kinship across language(s).”
Pedestal Magazine Review
“That notion of silence as a survival mechanism, and even a kind of language itself, finds its way into many of the poems in this collection. In silence, the poet listens, makes sense of the world, and ultimately starts to find a voice.”
Escape Into Life Review
“How on earth this works, in this complex, dazzling collection of poetry and poetic prose, left me, at first, a bit tongue-tied. But it does work, and beautifully.”
Praise for “Sister Tongue”
“Delicious, provocative, and incredibly wise, Farnaz Fatemi transcends years and oceans in these pages. Like gripping a cup and string to the ear, Sister Tongue is a hopeful missive, proof of words and their witnesses, an atlas of the wonder of becoming.”—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
“Poet Farnaz Fatemi is the soulful Iranian American truth-teller and wonder-wanderer we’ve needed to hear. In Farsi, in English, in Tehran, or California, these poems cherish the miracle of connectedness by weaving family threads through time and space—through sisters, mothers, grandmothers, through a changed and changing world. Sister Tongue is a luscious love letter to language(s), spoken in a trusting, intimate voice. The poet recognizes the twinned solace of silence and song, of sister and self. Loss takes its seat, as it does, at the table, and Fatemi, with tea, family history, powerful memory, and a new/old tongue, inscribes it alongside the depths of beauty and joy in this radiant book of passionate understanding.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum
“I praise the present tense of these poems for its tensile strength, its ability to hold the struggle that is happening in the past, present, and future. The way it speaks of the perpetual, of what it is to be tongue-tied in the presence of one’s other self. ‘Language is geological,’ this speaker tells us, ‘a process of accumulation, and accretion accompanied by landslides.’ In setting out to speak the language of her blood, she finds herself at once estranged and embraced. Thrilled and defeated. What to do with such a natural disaster? These poems persist in their attempts to bridge worlds, offering hope of a complex and hard-won reconciliation, one richly crafted line at a time. In the words of Fatemi, ‘I want the foreigner in me / to meet the foreigner in me.’”—Danusha Laméris, author of Bonfire Opera“
Sister Tongue, Farnaz Fatemi’s debut poetry collection, transports us to a place where language must stretch to fit the largeness of human love and longing, and in doing so, fills the absences we did not even know we harbored. Sister Tongue begins to say what many of us already know—that borders and countries are too limiting to define us. Her poems offer us both a reckoning and a salve.”—Persis M. Karim, chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University
“Neither exile nor immigrant, Farnaz Fatemi writes with a double intelligence that transcends any presuppositions we might bring to a poetry of the other. She claims her strategic advantage with confidence and laser-like insight, the gift of deep listening and the power of naming, as she slips back and forth freely across borders like a master spy reporting from an uncharted world suspended between two cultures. I am optimistic that Sister Tongue speaks the language of our future.”—Zara Houshmand, writer
“Thick with striking sensory detail and lingering images, "Sister Tongue" traces the narrator’s return to Tehran after 25 years abroad. It is lush and lamenting, returning again and again to the tongue, the mouth, the breath, considering both the power and constraints of language and the work of silence in family connections and the continuous shift of one’s sense of self. A truly gorgeous piece of writing.”—International Literary Awards, Penelope Niven Prize in Creative Non-Fiction 2018; Judge Seema Reza
"I am a sucker for any story that is a search for language--there's something beautiful about trying to find the words to say something while using a tongue that is familiar to us--to somehow write ourselves into a form of translating what we cannot understand. This piece, about overcoming being a stranger in a place where one should feel at home, is a beautiful examination of all of the words that we mispronounce.”—Kurt Brown Prize, 2017; Judge Brian Oliu