Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi

“The window at Flying Books, Queen Street, Toronto.”

Readings

A book of poetry from the past five years

Ayaz Pirani, How Beautiful People Are (Gordon Hill Press, 2023).

My dear friend, and mentor, Ayaz Pirani published a book named How Beautiful People Are with Gordon Hill Press in 2023 which has become one of my all-time favorite books of poetry. The book explores the absurdities of language in the tradition (and is indebted to!) the work of the great mystic poet Kabir.

Pirani takes the mysticism of ancient India and places it within a contemporary world, and uses the absurdities of language to showcase the absurdities of race relations in the wake of colonial violence. There's a rage there and there is quite an edge to that grace of misaligned grammar, but somehow the work moves at such a placid pace. Its a wonder the way Pirani puts a poem together. There's something quite ecstatic about reading and re-reading while learning and re-learning the language of the poem. I have seen nothing like it.

A book of poetry that was important to you at a specific moment in your life (i.e. a breakup, death, during pregnancy, when your children were young, during illness, etc. etc.)

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (1905)

Rilke’s Book of Hours got me through bed bugs. At some point I had a fiction piece that began "Rilke got me thru bedbugs" but I scrapped it. I had the most aggressive, most resilient bedbugs for an entire year, and the summer, when we thought they were gone, my family visited from Iran and they came back in the height of summer heat, when we had 5 extra people in the house. The only thing that got me going was opening the Rilke book and going into that densely imagistic world. I read the first poem so many times I remember it almost line by line, in both English AND German.

A book of poetry by a friend and how knowing that poet affects your reading

There is no one in this earth that inspires me more than my buddy jo who publishes under the name elio ianni. Their last chapbook "inside inside inside" was published by Apt 9 press in 2023 and their next project is upcoming with apt 9 sometime this year! Their work, NO their very poetic existence, their resilience, the no-bullshit mysticism of living their life of poetry inspires me more than anything. jo taught me poetry is a living practice, and not an "activity" distinct from anything during the day. Before meeting jo I think I’d sit down at the end of a day and write a poem. By that I mean, I’d finish a day and sit down thinking, "This is my poetry writing hour" and sit with pen and paper or laptop to write. After jo, I'm writing all day. I see something, I jott down a word. I’m writing a word every hour or two, but the poem is gathered from living itself and is a practice of being there, as opposed to an "exercise" at the end of a workday. My buddy jo has made poetry integral to how I live. My buddy jo is a poet thru and thru because none of his poems are separate from him as a person. His poetry is from him and within him in a way that no one else can replicate.

A poet or book of poetry from before 1800

Sheik Mahmoud Sabistari, Gulshan-i-Raz (“The Mystic Flower Garden”) (14th century)

Sheikh Mahmoud Shabistari's Gulshan-i-Raz (or the flower garden of mystery, most prominently translated as "The Mystic Flower Garden") from the 14th century is my all-time favorite Persian classic. First of all, its short, but even in its short 90 or so pages, it seems to so perfectly encapsulate the entirety of Perso-Islamic ideology into one pocket sized masterpiece. You can read and learn the basics of Mysticism, astrology, Qur'anic thought, Illuminationism, Mu'tazalite questioning, Sufism (I'm separating it from the general mysticism) as well as the peripatetic basics of Islamic philosophy. I wish there were better translations of it available for English language readers, but I enjoy opening it up and reading a few pages in the original Persian every once in a while.

The book is basically about a gathering of sages, where a grand sage is answering all the most cutting philosophical questions of others. Questions like "What does it mean to journey into oneself?", "What is it that we call thought?”, Where is this "Thought" situated really?", "How come we are sinful while knowing the true path?", "What is the journey?” “Who is the perfect human?" and my personal favorite: "What Ocean beaches its own discourse? What pearls can be found in its flotsam really?" (all above translations are mine).

This book is so germinal to my thinking, that I have a free-hand calligraphy of one of its most prominent lines of poetry tattooed on my left arm. The line goes

که باشم من مرا از من خبر کن

which I'll translate to "Who am I? Inform me of myself.” It’s one of only 2 lines of poetry I like to think I live by.

A poet or book in translation or in another language

Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead. Translated by Pierre Joris (FSG, 2014)

Listen, as far as Celan-lovers go, I'm not one of the best in recognizing his mastery and titanic extent of his influence, but in my practice of both writing AND translating, nothing has been more influential than Pierre Joris's translations of Paul Celan, ESPECIALLY Breathturn into Timestead, released in 2014 by FSG.

I think more than anything, the brilliance was in seeing how Pierre Joris handled the agglutination of Germanic super-words into English, and how that changed the game for me not just in word construction, but in handling difficult translations from Persian to English.

Writings

Amid our Et-ceteras

“Night

Licks the forehead

Off its fingers” — Eliot Cardinaux

A well-deserved nobody

Finds me nude amid form-

Fitting etceteras. Vodka

Sauce in low-tide. Pecorino

Romano. Shaking hands

All felicities aquiver.

Wait on winter’s filter.

The rounded halo of

Mass hysteria. The

Immediately pale event

Is exactly how the day

Wasps away from us.

The Hatch-back

“the bones of this Me piece” — Ali Pinkney

my comrade in being

identical. my fellow

thinker in italics. a person.

ok. then what else has been?

my deep deep pocket has

its mice. my interrupted

sentence has its deep

deep compromise. the

winter exponentially heats

up because the water can

legally take ur house. when i

see a cigarette I smoke it.

no questions asked. big boi

love has its big boi costs.

Trojan horse into the

Trojan city of Troy

like pills in plaits of blood.

the myth of seasides and

the few houses that were

stared out from. that old empire

of purpose who pretends at the

chain but grinds his teeth

to the tune of the guitar.

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi lives in Toronto. The author of four collections of poetry, their work has recently been published by The Fiddlehead, maybe magazine, Bad Dog Magazine, and Black Warrior Review. Andarznama (translation. original work by Ghazal Mosadeq) is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Press (Fall 2025).