Granny Cloud, Paperback

A playful, ecstatic, and invigorating collection of lyrical work by one of America's finest young poets. In Granny Cloud, Farnoosh Fathi presents poetry as the pursuit of one's highest attention, of freedom in formlessness, and joy in surrender.

Like the dispirited court tumbler in the French medieval legend said to have inspired St. Francis's eponymous "Jongleurs de Dieu" who takes up a daily ritual of tumbling on his hands in a dark cave before a portrait of the Virgin Mary, Fathi renews our faith in the lyric imagination through wild headstands and handsprings of impishly erotic language "soiled in fecal rhymes."

The title of her book links to both the progressive cloud-based educational program in India and the "grandmaternal mind" in Zen Buddhism-a mind that is tender, equanimous, and free to be absorbed by everything one encounters.