Stone Soup Poetry will meet from 8-10 p.m. with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. Featuring for the first time will be the poet Ala Khaki.
Ala Khaki was born in Iran in 1955. Twice he was a political prisoner under the Shah’s regime for his participation in the democracy movement at the ages of 18 and 19 respectively. In 1978, a year after his second release and the destruction of his first book, From Here to Sunrise (some of those poems were later published in his Farsi chapbook Calling The Dawn over fifteen years later), he left Iran for America after receiving a tip from a relative with ties to the military that he was on a death squad list.
Khaki reads at a monthly literary gathering of Iranians in Boston and was recently a feature at the New England Poetry Conference. His poems have appeared in Iranian literary journals including The Book Review, Par (Feather) and Thought and Imagination. He lives in New Hampshire and is working on the second collection of his Farsi poems. His first chapbook in English, Return, should be ready by the time he visits Stone Soup on the 26th. A sample poem is below:
Decay
Ala Khaki
Eyes burning,
stung by the harsh
foul fog of lies
surrounded by crocodile prophets
we are effortlessly drowning
in a shallow marsh.
