PRAISE
Mandana Zandian’s poems are highly inspiring in the original Persian and felicitous in this English translation.
—Ehsan Yarshater, Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies, Columbia University
Having left behind the growing pains of a revolution gone awry and having tasted the bitter air of an exile that seems eternally unsettling, in "An Eyeful of Earth, an Eyeful of Ocean" Zandian gives centrality to an idea of love that is gripping in its glance, soothing in its voice and utterly engulfing in its embrace.
—Esmail Khoi, Iranian Poet, London
Informed by the long lyrical tradition in Persian poetry, the love poems of Mandana Zandian provide a feast for the senses. Her lines are imbued with easily accessible abstractions in a simple and highly economical language that whispers raindrops and shimmers in the implicative power of imagery that is uniquely hers.
—Houra Yavari, Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University
DESCRIPTION
Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak has selected and ably translated the poems of Mandana Zandian's poems. The translation includes poems which have never been published in the original.
AUTHOR
 Mandana Zandian is an Iranian-American poet, journal-ist, and physician, and all these aspects of her life seem to have played a part in the character of the poetic universe she has created over the past fifteen years.
Born in Esfahan, Iran, in 1972, Mandana Zandian went through her education in her homeland, graduating from Shahid Beheshti University’s School of Medicine in 1997. She has lived through the tumult and various tribulations of Iran’s recent history, the revolution and the violence it ushered in as well as the devastating war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, have colored her childhood, while an incomplete and badly thwarted reform movement has left an indelible mark on her youthful psyche. In 2000 she and her husband moved to the United States. Meanwhile, poetry was gaining ground steadily in her imagination, and the first two collections of her poems, Blue Gaze (2002) and The Labyrinth of Silence (2004) were published in Iran. Beginning in 2006, the journalist Iraj Gorgin detected and nurtured the talent in the young woman as a public intellectual, one in the use of the Persian language and the art of the interview. Over the past seven years or so, she has produced two books primarily based on conversations and conducted numerous in-depth interviews with various luminaries among Iranians in exile. In more recent years, through the art of radio interviews, she has further extended her reach into the life and work of Iranian and Persian-speaking poets like herself all over the world, as well as in her home country of Iran.
TRANSLATOR
 Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak is a professor of Persian and and founding director of the Roshan Center for Persian Studies. In addition to authoring twenty books, he is a contributor to Encyclopedia Britannica and Encyclopedia Iranica.
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