Farnoosh Fathi

A playful, ecstatic, and invigorating collection of lyrical work by one of America's finest young poets. In Granny Cloud, Farnoosh Fathi presents poetry as the pursuit of one's highest attention, of freedom in formlessness, and joy in surrender. Like the dispirited court tumbler in the French medieval legend said to have inspired St. Francis's eponymous "Jongleurs de Dieu" who takes up a daily ritual of tumbling on his hands in a dark cave before a portrait of the Virgin Mary, Fathi renews our faith in the lyric imagination through wild headstands and handsprings of impishly erotic language "soiled in fecal rhymes." The title of her book links to both the progressive cloud-based educational program in India and the "grandmaternal mind" in Zen Buddhism--a mind that is tender, equanimous, and free to be absorbed by everything one encounters. Iterations of lines tumble from poem to poem through repeated portraits of home and children, peas and baldness, worms, spiders, and snails that collect in a salivating grand cloud of lyric reinvention. The cave of her own lyric process is foregrounded in the long poem of the third and last section "Anyone's Don'tanelle" which tracks the drafts and do-overs of the writing of the poem "Fontanelle," that appears in the first section. In poem after poem, Granny Cloud raises a stained-glass popsicle to whatever inner chariot that carries the lyric spark through the ecstatic housekeeping of the word.

The first appearance of this award-winning writer's work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray's striking poetry to its originally intended form. Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray's sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been almost entirely unavailable for the better part of half a century. Poems was put together by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray's mother, and when Murray's papers, long thought to be lost, reappeared in 2013, it became clear that Code had exercised a heavy editorial hand. This new collection, edited by Farnoosh Fathi from Murray's original manuscripts, restores Murray's raw lyricism and visionary lines, while also including a good deal of previously unpublished work, as well as a selection of her exuberant letters.