Arash Allahverdi’s “Shitkilling,” translated from the Farsi by Thade Correa and Alireza Taheri Araghi, is a powerful poetry standout in Asymptote’s Winter Issue. It’s seductive: inviting its readers to read, “to come and do drugs,” to submit to the poem’s provocations—and “as if semen drink the water”—the poem is a one-of-a-kind experience of the high and low, of the routine and the extraordinary.
come
come and do drugs
bring the drugs and do it
drink
drink the water
as if semen drink the water
Patty: Especially as it appears in Asymptote’s latest winter publication, Correa and Araghi’s translation of “Shitkilling” swells in profundity. In a digital format already marked by abstraction to the casual reader (think Tumblr, GIFs, and Tao Lin), Allahverdi’s poem appears fragmented, distracted, even angry. But the poem’s offhandedness is false; its faux ephemera only augments the poem’s primality and the reader’s complete helplessness at the grossness of existence that it depicts. Despite our pretensions, we are mired in bodies, “Shitkilling” seems to say. Our organs grind along, producing urine, feces, semen, in the face of a brittle language begging to deny its own charade.
drink and piss
piss on the office ceramic tiles
don’t tell your colleague you pissed
tell him this is orange juice
your colleague will cheer up
Eva: The poem compellingly mingles the often-invoked categories of “high” and “low” (religious imagery with images of sex and drugs, for example), skillfully adding to the mix everyday specifics of the speaker’s discontented life—office ceramic tiles, angered colleagues, Lorazepam to sleep, an ignorant father-in-law. Consequently, the poem’s speaker seems to hail from a very specific and familiar-to-us-all place (“this neighborhood is hell / and this will be your fate”)—the reader knows his exasperation and boredom. The sex, drugs, and powerful religious images that punctuate the poem tear apart this banal, frustrating world, lending the poem much of its remarkable intensity.
and say real friends share drinks
and there are consequences
but don’t worry
tell lies
sleep
take lorazepam and sleep in the office
think of hips in your sleep
think of the capacities of hips
[…]
you also know that God himself knows
and he knows that he himself knows
and he knows that the Lord brings thousands of likenesses
forth
and he himself knows that you
are not even one of these likenesses
and he himself knows that you
are only scum, only excrement
and you yourself know that in excrement
—and the excrement knows it itself—
there are a thousand secrets
Eva: Allahverdi surprises throughout the poem, which deftly moves between registers, tones, vocabularies, and images, but constantly maintains a hypnotic quality through its subtly varied repetition (in the above stanza: himself, himself, yourself, itself).
The speaker reveals his anguishes and neuroses in powerful strokes. His admission that he knows and god knows that he is not one of god’s likenesses is especially strong—that he is “only scum, only excrement.” But even this statement might not be so startling if not for the one that follows. The poem proclaims that, like a god who knows itself and its likenesses, excrement knows itself too, is self-aware, and even this excrement—in which the poem is so fantastically mired—hides “a thousand secrets.”
***
Read Arash Allahverdi’s poem “Shitkilling” in its entirety in Asymptote’s January 2014 Issue.
***
Born in 1983 in Shiraz, Arash Allahverdi began writing poetry at age fifteen. His first book, Fury (2007), was an e-publication. After his second book, The Book of the Blood (2010), could not obtain a publication license, he again forwent conventional publishing and released it in e-book format. He currently edits a website dedicated to contemporary Persian poetry.
Alireza Taheri Araghi is an Iranian writer and translator. He has translated three collections of short stories into Farsi. His work has appeared in The Gloom Cupboard, Re:Visions, and Avatar Review. He is currently a creative writing M.F.A. candidate at the University of Notre Dame and edits the online journal PARAGRAPHITI.
Thade Correa hails from Northwest Indiana. He received his B.A. from Indiana University, Bloomington, his M.A. from the University of Chicago, and his M.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame. His work has appeared in various journals and recently garnered him the 2012 Billy Maich Academy of American Poets Prize.
