Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest.
‘The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi is a wondrous treasure – elegant poems of great tenderness and detail, vivid in heart and imagery, mesmerising in power. Whole worlds and people shimmer alive through scenes and stories of exile, departure, arrival, but most importantly, clear witness and remembrance. A deeply honouring book fully built of love.’
– Naomi Shihab Nye
‘Knowingly, tenderly, and not without pain, these poems are reflections on place and the complicated feelings that accompany leaving a place and arriving elsewhere. The Wrong Person to Ask is as precise as it is dynamic; every line is exact, and each image carefully sculpted.’
– Forward Prize Judge
‘In this unforgettable and assured debut collection, Lotfi explores issues of belonging and identity – firstly the lost world of an Iranian childhood through the eyes of a young refugee and ultimately the found worlds of America and Scotland. She brilliantly illustrates the little tragedies of global politics by focussing on the luminous, ordinary rituals of daily life. These are poems built both to haunt and reaffirm us; poems of the living, breathing world and our overarching right to find a home in it.’
– John Glenday
“It is rare to find a first collection so surefooted and beautifully balanced as Marjorie Lotfi’s The Wrong Person to Ask. It is especially thrilling for me to find childhood memories of Iran familiar to those of us in the diaspora, but equally recognisable to others through the transfigurative power of the verse. In her role of interlocutor, Marjorie reanimates newspaper articles, photos, quotations, often rescuing us from compassion fatigue with her attentive eye and open-heartedness. Displacement and belonging are held in balance. Rupture and healing come hand in hand. Losses are irretrievable but the courage to name them doesn’t fail. And our trust in poetry to communicate, to be valued, to be transformative and answerable, in poem after poem, is poignantly affirmed. This is a wonderfully assured collection, full of grace.”
– Mimi Khalvati
