Forthcoming by Asemana Books (January 2027)
Poems by
ISBN: 9781997503477
Cover art: Saeed Foroughi
Journal of the Dead is a collection of poems by Mahsa Foroughi, poems shaped by adolescence, youth, migration, the body, memory, loss, womanhood, love, politics, family, and life in fractured worlds. This book gives voice to a speaker whose words remained for years in notebooks, suitcases, and silence, and who now, after a long period of concealment, finally emerges onto the page.
In this collection, poetry is not merely a play with language but a means of survival, endurance, and remaking the world. Through an emotional, imagistic, and at times fearless voice, Foroughi moves between personal and collective experience, creating a landscape where memory, the body, death, love, violence, femininity, and hope are intimately intertwined.
As its title suggests, Journal of the Dead is a record of fragments: reports from the body, dispatches from love, brief accounts of death, and marginal notes from everyday life. It is a book for readers who understand that poetry is something that lives within us, and that the poet is merely the mirror through which it becomes visible.
This collection is an invitation to listen, to the rebellious voice of an adolescent girl whose rebellion is itself a testament to life.
