A Letter to Niloufar Talebi's Self-Portrait in Bloom

Using the epistolary, Julie Marie Wade reviews Self-Portrait in Bloom (L'Aleph, 2019), a "hybrid wonder" by translator, artist, and writer Niloufar Talebi, for The Rumpus. "As I read deeper and deeper into your book, I found myself thinking of the whole project as one extraordinary epistle: part memoir, part poetry, part found artifact/imported text, part meta-meditation on the nature of language and the intricacies of translation between languages," writes Wade. More:

Niloufar, do you know precisely when I fell in love with your book—when I felt that special feeling I recognized from my youth of opening an envelope inscribed with my name—the thrill that someone had taken care to write and send a letter to me? It was the page before your Prologue and after your Contents. Another interstice, another mezzanine. Your book is full of glorious limbos. But here, three perfect sentences, italicized—a trifecta: “There are two books in this book. One portrait of me and one of Ahmad Shamlou. And they intersect.”

In grad school, I studied poetry, officially, though I also studied creative nonfiction, optionally, for my elective courses. My poetry thesis adviser, the brilliant and capacious Suzanne Paola (if you don’t know her work, please allow me to recommend her to you—I think you share a deep hybrid vigor in common), was guiding my production of a collection of poems, but simultaneously, and under a slightly different name—Susanne Antonetta—she was publishing her own first book of creative nonfiction, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir. The subtitle, even more than the title, astonished and riveted me. What was an “environmental memoir?” What could it be? And then in reading the book, I realized...

Find the full fan letter at The Rumpus.