Scattered Arils
From Milk & Cake Press, Dena Rod’s debut poetry collection Scattered Arils is now in its fourth printing! Titled after the colloquial name for pomegranate seeds, the poems in Scattered Arils excavate familial memory and ancestral inheritance. You can purchase Scattered Arils from Milk & Cake Press, City Lights Bookstore, Green Apple Bookstore, and Eastwind Books of Berkeley.
“Dena Rod's debut collection, Scattered Arils, is a tribute to what roots us and what eludes us. Their attention to earthly feeling--the ways we belong to people and countries, to families and the earth, and all the ways we must remake ourselves when the ties are severed--are beautifully evoked. The arils of which they write--small seeds of the glorious and complex pomegranate--are the essence of what's still possible when we feel lost, displaced, misunderstood. Rod's language and the feelings in them are so familiar to so many of us…” -Persis Karim, Director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies, Professor, and Poet
swallow a beginning
Dena Rod’s first chapbook debuted on tour with Sister Spit 2020. Rod’s poems interrogate and explore humanity’s connection to the temporal world, while envisioning a radical queer future where national borders dissolve. A slim but potent volume of poetry, there was a limited print run of 100 copies that sold out within a month of printing.
now in its 2nd printing
from University of Texas Press, this collection brings together thirty-two authors, both established and emerging, whose writing captures the diversity of Iranian diasporic experiences. Reflecting on the Iranian American experience over the past forty years and shedding new light on themes of identity, duality, and alienation in twenty-first-century America, the authors present personal narratives of immigration, sexuality, marginalization, marriage, and religion that offer an antidote to the news media’s often superficial portrayals of Iran and the people who have a connection to it. My Shadow Is My Skin illuminates a community that rarely gets to tell its own story.
Cover Art by Mina Jafari