Rosa Jamali

Rosa Jamali (b.1977) is an Iranian poet based in Tehran. She studied Dramatic Literature at the Art University of Tehran and earned a master’s degree in English literature at Tehran University. She has published six collections of poetry so far. Her first book, titled This Dead Body Is Not an Apple, It Is Either a Cucumber or a Pear, was published in 1997. Critics credit this collection with opening new landscapes and possibilities for contemporary Persian poetry. Through paronomasia and broken syntax, she describes a surreal world in which words lose their original meaning and turn into jumbled objects in everyday life. In her other collections, Jamali adapted the musical structures of classical Persian poetry, mixing them with the natural cadences of speech and juxtaposing long and short sentences. In her recent poems, she has drawn upon Persian mythology and mysticism, experimenting with the imagery of Persian Illuminationist poets such as Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1154-1191 AD). Non-Iranian poets such as T.S. Eliot and John Ashbery have also greatly influenced Jamali’s poetry.