Eve Esfandiari-Denney: *Girling* & Ghazal Mosadeq: *The Book of Advice*

Join us at EBB to celebrate the publication of Eve Esfandiari-Denney's first poetry collection: *Girling* (Fitzcarraldo Editions) and Ghazal Mosadeq's *The Book of Advice* (Ugly Duckling Press). Readings by the authors and conversation with the audience.

ON *GIRLING*

In *Girling*, her open-hearted debut collection, Eve Esfandiary-Denney wrestles with the boundaries between living and death, history and the present, and how these are preordained for us in the fabric of our DNA and in our geographical or cultural environments. Through a personal relationship with illness and a closeness to death, the author asks the reader, ‘I hope it’s ok to die. I can / be something / like actualized metaphor.’ She recounts the story of a father left abandoned in a church, and remembers a grandmother’s home in a traveller’s caravan. Grief is portrayed with a tongue in cheek, cosmic register, as the speaker invests in ‘lions’ mane’, attempts to feel ‘super-radiant’, and moves into ‘moon pose’, while we watch electronic deep-sea claws on YouTube, and google ‘what to do if your mum died last night’. Philosophical, funny, pertinent, ecological, global and intimate, this is a collection of poems for the contemporary moment, a book deeply personal yet communal in its intention, beginning from a personal history then resonating outwards, ending on a note so gorgeously hopeful, as ‘life’ moves towards the speaker, ‘gloriously close’.

‘*Girling* glides through death, pain, surprise and survival to arrive at the most gorgeous and hopeful principle for living. The sensation of not-knowing, or of being suspended in-between, becomes an opportunity to be more permeable, more open to the synchronicities and oddities of the world. This collection is mesmeric, elemental, luminous, but time spent with Eve’s writing also feels like the most intimate and generative conversations, the moments between friends that can alter the day’s shape.’ — Brodie Crellin, author of *A Sense of Occasion*

ON *THE BOOK OF ADVICE*

*The Book of Advice*, an experiment in self-translation, stems from the andarznameh tradition of classical Persian literature, a form that moves between verse and prose as it engages invented or familiar sayings and folktales. Originally written in Persian between 2018-2020, the book now speaks in both English and Persian, opening at once from the back and the front, in a voice both distanced and familiar. The vicissitudes of the everyday preoccupy its intimately impersonal speaker as she wrestles with the inadequacy and mobility of language.

With meticulous and pensive care, Ghazal Mosadeq takes the ethical temperature of the world around her, creating in the process, an almost tangible atmosphere—we can feel the breeze through the open window, smell her days full of rain. Always attentive to the subtlest levels of human interaction, Mosadeq shows a responsibility to others that manages to be both exacting and generous. A gorgeous book unafraid to look at the difficulties inherent in being human and to honor them lovingly. — Cole Swensen

*The Book of Advice* 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 Vahni Capildeo

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eve Esfandiari-Denney’s debut poetry pamphlet, *My Bodies This Morning This Evening*, was published by Bad Betty Press in 2022. She has been shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize, Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Award, the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Performed) and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Granta, BBC Radio 4 and Prototypes Annual Anthology, among others.

Ghazal Mosadeq is a poet, editor and translator. She is the founder of Pamenar Press, an independent publisher of poetry, translation, hybrid and critical writing. Her own work has been published by Shearsman, Fence, Arc Poetry, Fiddlehead, Asymptote, Modern Poetry In Translation, and Words Without Borders, among others. Her latest collections are *If*, a pamphlet with Tripwire, and *The Book of Advice*, published by Ugly Duckling Press. She is a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.