Haji as Puppet

About Roger Sedarat

Roger Sedarat is an Iranian-American poet and translator, the author of three previous poetry collections: Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic (winner of the Ohio University Press Hollis Summers Prize), Ghazal Games, and Foot Faults: Tennis Poems. A recent recipient of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, he teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York.

Praise for Haji as Puppet

Roger Sedarat has created what I consider one of the greatest masterpieces of the Iranian-American canon. Haji as Puppet is a psychedelic romp through ancient Persian psyche all the way through modern Iranian hellscapes via the American imagination. This piercing Middle Eastern minstrelsy is unapologetically raw in its collisions with race, gender, sexuality, and pop culture. Sedarat truly understands the punk soul of Persian satire, and the way conviviality lives with calamity and pandemonium razes ritual. This is not your baba’s Rumi—and thank goodness!
—Porochista Khakpour, author of The Last Illusion and Sons & Other Flammable Objects

From the opening act of this provocative literary burlesque, the reader will recognize the startling truths behind the timely and biting satire. Roger Sedarat’s commentary about empire, its devious hold over our appetites and narcissisms, over our ignorance and phobias, confronts us with our complicity in our own manipulation, making us uncomfortable and accountable. Haji as Puppet is political theater at its most entertaining, at its most daring.
—Rigoberto González, author of Unpeopled Eden and Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa