"ConQuest by Arash Allahverdi, translated by Ali Araghi, is the first full-length poetry collection from one of the standout poets in the critically acclaimed anthology 'I am a face sympathizing with your grief : seven younger Iranian poets' (co•im•press 2015). ConQuest is unique because it functions like two books in one. In the first "book," Conquest, readers experience Allahverdi's hard-hitting poems of alienation, absurdity, and anger, set against the backdrop of capital city, Tehran, and revealing an intimate perspective told by a member of the generation that came of age in the shadow of the devastating Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and marched the streets during the 2009 protests. As part of the Matrod Poetry Circle that rejected the Persian literary status quo, Allahverdi writes poems emblematic of the hyper-expressionism advocated by the group, rejecting the baroque artifices of the Iranian language poetry trends of the nineties. By turns, the second "book," ConQuest, is a facing-page, bilingual edition of Conquest, including commentary--text exchanges between poet and translator that took place over Telegram and WhatsApp as Araghi worked through the challenges of Englishing Allahverdi's poems. In creating ConQuest, Araghi has lifted the veil, letting readers see the process of translation in action, while also providing useful contextual information that an English-speaking audience would not know, providing a rich--and enriching--quest to undertake"--From Small Press Distribution website.
