Soraya Shalforoosh
Watching Killing Joke Videos with Dad
Dad would watch the “Eighties” video and laugh whenever Ayatollah flashed on the screen. We loved punk, and that in our suburban home we had a glimpse of Iranian politics, a rock band acknowledged us. And like a punk, Iran was also always so defiant, as Jaz Coleman sings and shouts “Living in the Eighties” and “Struggle!” and we watched the ultra-spiked hair, hard leather jackets, Thatcher, Reagan, glimpses of war and Islam flash on our TV in suburban NJ, where outside they feared—us
Soraya Shalforoosh is the author of This Version of Earth (Barrow Street, 2014). She has been a featured poet in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets Emerging Poet Series, and has had poems and reviews in Black Earth Institute, Apogee Journal, Taos Journal, Barrow Street, Lumina Journal, Skanky Possum, and Marlboro Review, among others. She hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and as an undergraduate at Clark University won the Prentiss Cheney Hoyt Poetry award. She has been a guest poet at William Paterson University in New Jersey, Berkeley College in New York, San Jose State University and a guest speaker at the American Embassy in Algeria.
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