Jahan Khajavi’s Feast of the Ass, published this year by Ugly Duckling Presse, is a strange creature, filled with sly humor, facing violence head-on, awash in lust frustrated and sated alike, filled with customs and cultures and tributes to the dead of yesterday’s Persia and today’s Iran, of England and Rome and France and beyond.
The title itself is a part of this syncratic poetry, and a theme that will, in ways ranging from the sacred to the profane, from prayer to sated lust, reappear again and again and again throughout Khajavi’s poetry. (And I do mean that: we get everything from ass to rectum to booty hole to, well, everything else you can think of, along with a lot of metaphors that probably wouldn’t have occurred to you but totally, completely work.) The Feast of the Ass is a real thing, or was, anyway, and Khajavi winks at its Christian past here and there throughout a volume deeply immersed in both Persian and Muslim culture.
The poetic voice moves from revolution (and the Shah) to Shakespeare, from the beloved’s beautiful ass to pleading for tender treatment of suicides at the hand of God, covering a vast landscape that somehow is also almost painfully intimate. In one of the final stanzas of the lengthy poem “Inverted Loveseat,” almost to the end of Feast of the Ass, we are reminded of the power of pleasure when the poetic voices tells us:
Know holy words & vulgar words are worth / the same. Our aim is to corrupt on earth— / divulge, before we’re forced now to depart, / the truth: our only real relief was vice.
Does it tie up Khajavi’s sly, smart, tender Feast of the Ass? I don’t really think any one piece can: there is way too much going on here to live or die by any four lines, no matter how brilliant I find them. But it does speak to the brilliance of the poetic voice here, to the ways in which sadness and lust and life intertwine and cultures bend together like lovers.
Essentially a Nerd 