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Khashayar Kess Mohammadim, "The Book of Interruptions" (Buckrider Books, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello everyone and welcome to nbn. I'm your host Holly Gattery and I am delighted to be joined today by Khashair Kes Mohamedi to talk about their wonderful new poetry collection, the Book of Interruptions. Welcome to the show, Kess.
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B
Hello. Hello. Welcome. Sorry.
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A
I'm being welcomed too. Yes, that's good. I'll take it. So the Book of Interruptions has brought is a collection of poems written with scalpel like precision, infused with preemptive violence. These poems mark the intersection of war, immigration, sexuality and history with lines often placed at the crown crossroads of Middle Eastern and western thoughts. Moving between an Iran that is marked with tulips from the martyrs blood. That is a lovely line in quotations. And Toronto, a city that is always screaming but where the author is quote a ghost. Antidotal. Kess writes unflinchingly of the reality that faces them and others like them who straddle two worlds. But within this fierce collection there is also room for art and for pleasure and for words that invite us all with gentle patterns of light against light against light. And that's another wonderful quote from the book. Khasher Kes Mohammadi is a queer, Iranian born Toronto based poet, writer and translator. They are the winner of the 2021 Fallam Poetry Prize and the author of nine chapbooks of poetry. Book of Interruptions is their fifth poetry book. So Cas, we're going to start with an admission on my part. I am a little bit intimidated. You're the first poet or author I've been intimidated about interviewing and hear me out. You know I'm a poet and I would say I'm capable of and also defined by multi level thinking. I can't see a raindrop and not feel an ocean. The simultaneous nature of existence is always present. But that said, I feel like you're the doctor Strange of poetry. If you'll. If you'll pardon the, the. The likeness. And I mean that in the best possible way, no matter how many levels I am thinking on your experience in a whole other dimension, which is why I wanted to talk to you and why I love listening to you talk about literature and poetry. But also, I'm a bit intimidated, so please be gentle with me.
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B
Well, to. To those who actually don't know this, me and Holly go way back. So it's like. It's not like we're strangers to each other. We've known each other and admired each other. And I want to say, at least from my part, they genuinely love each other quite a lot. Because. And it's not just because of. I mean, I know we have. We love each other's work, but it's also that we just get along. So I also want to bring that up because we are not two strangers who have just signed into a meeting to talk to each other. We are also people who have intersected and had quite some fun discussing a lot of this different aspects of Lyriche with each other. But I want to first ask if you have any specific questions. If not, I'll get into a bigger, larger gist of what this book stands to me, but I want to just know if you have any specific questions about what it is that you feel intimidates you about this.
- [04:14]
A
Well, I think it's okay. So, yes, we do know each other. We have. We have spilt much tea together in our time. As. As the kids say that that is something, you know, Kes is the easiest person in the world for me to talk to. That's not. When we are talking about poetry, though, and Kes's art, I feel like I'm in dumbstruck awe most of the time. So that is where the intimidation is coming from. Now we can start. I'm going to get into a specific in a second, but before we do that, I was wondering if you could speak more broadly about the collection for our listeners and maybe give us a little bit of background on where this collection started for you.
- [04:57]
B
So I want to very specifically talk about this book as a. I mean, this is my fifth poetry book, and I want to say everything I wrote before this is very much so bound to a specific time. So, like, my first book is just what I wrote over two years. You know, I'm not saying that I don't like it or it's not. I'm just saying that everything I wrote before this was written just as single poems over a certain time and then given up as a book. But I think Book of Interruptions was the first book that I sat down with an idea. I sat down with an entire concept. And I carried it and created something that I wanted within that concept. And the concept was. First of all, I think there's the greater concept, which is that just how do you write about the Middle East? How do you write about West Asia? Suamina. There are a lot of different ways to say that, and I understand, but also there's always the idea of. I also have to mention here that everything that was produced within this book, it was. I think it has the gravitas that it has. Because I sought, through an Ontario Arts Council development grant, I sought extensive one on one mentorships with two different poets, Zoe Imani Sharp and my Muslim elder, Rahat Kaurd. And I want to say that with Zoe Imani Sharpe, it was more about the form and format. And with Rahat Kord, it was mostly the philosophical parts, like, what does it mean to present the intricacies of the Middle east, the inner turmoil, the ideas about the diaspora, the intergenerational issues, the elitism, the. And a volley of different aspects of our culture that is perhaps known in a certain way outside and known a different way inside. And so basically, this book started as a bunch of interruptions of common narrative. So wherever I thought there is a common narrative that I basically do not agree with or I find too reductive, I found interruptions of that narrative that I could bring into this whole book of interruptions. Basically, this is called the Book of Interruptions because there are interruptions of all the. What we call common thought that has roots in destructive colonial and imperial thought, both from inside and outside the Middle East. So when I say colonial, it's not only the colonialism of the west, it is also the colonialism that is often overlooked from within the Middle east and the imperialism that sometimes we seek as a response to that colonialism.
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A
Anyway, yeah, I was gonna say, listeners, this is what I'm talking about when I say the doctor Strange poetry. We have so many dimensions. And I can remember I picked up your book for the first time and sat down with it. I had a PDF for a while, but I really sat down with the book directly after an afternoon where I'd been arguing with someone. I mean, me arguing with someone is kind of status quo, but about someone saying that I did not look Iranian. And then I asked them what they thought Iranian people looked like. And when it was boiled down to it, it was. They kept naming movies with quote, unquote, Iranian people in them. And every person who they were mentioning usually was a terrorist. But not only that was Usually cast as South Asian person. And then what we revealed was that they didn't know what Iranian people looked like, actually. And they had a very reductive view of what an Iranian person looks like, and not an altogether accurate one either. It was a really interesting conversation that I sat down and read your book. And I felt delighted with the quiet revolutions happening within it. And not only revolutions in terms of revolution of thought, but also of cadence and attention to prosody and pacing. And that's one of the first questions I had, and not the one about the. Not the intimidation one. I'm going to get to that in a second. But one of the main reasons I'm intimidated by your book, I will get to that, but it's. I would love you to talk about the musicality in your language and about bringing that to the page, which can sometimes feel difficult. I can listen to poets talk and hear the musicality, but it's something they are bringing with them. Yours exists on the page, I would argue, independently of somebody reading it out loud.
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So one thing I would say is that I have found quite a novel way. And this is, again, it is new to me as well. In general, I have found performance reading not only a huge part of my work, but maybe the most important part of my work. So a work that I cannot read comfortably is a work that I do not want to publish. And I'd like to think I don't have pieces that I don't want to read because I write within the act of speech. And it comes from an exercise that I went through. So my third book of poetry was called Daffodils, and I wrote it entirely with voice. So the entire composition act of the book took place with a recorder where I would speak the poems. And after 68 recordings, which I have still, it is very important to me. These recordings of between 20 to an hour each were transcribed. And it completely changed the way I approach writing, because I think we often write and then read it out loud. But it really changed how I approached picking my words when I first spoke them, before I wrote them down, because I was thinking about how to say it better rather than how to express it better. So just approaching it from the act of speech, which actually continued in my next book with Clara du Plessis, where the book called. It also is. The book is called, but it is written as G. The third act of the poem was entirely written with voice notes as well. So it was called Speech. It was the speech part of our book. So this really changed how I Approach composition. So I begin at those cadences and reach a poem that makes sense as opposed to having an idea, writing it down, and then editing it while reading it out loud.
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A
What a great answer. That's something I have to adopt more because while I may love the word, for instance, sesquipedilian, I can't think of an instance where I'd want that in my work. And I put it in something recently, I was like, ugh, how pretentious. Get rid of. Take it out. Maybe somebody else can do more with it than I can. So my next question for you is about what I find to be one of the most. Like I said, what intimidates me. And that's. I would say that you are, and I don't use this term lightly, but I'd say that you are master of using the stage of the page. So when I look at your poems visually, they are very appealing. And that doesn't mean that, you know, you're. You're all over the place. It doesn't mean that I'm seeing acrobatics all over the page with the placement of, of words or, or lines. It's not that. It's that the way that the poems are presented to me feels intrinsic. In other words, sometimes when I'm reading people's work, I'm kind of editing it a little or thinking what I would do. But with your work, I can't do that. Like, it seems too fixed. It's like saying that my kneecap should be in my ear. Like it. It doesn't make sense. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the visual element of your work. Now that we've talked about the non visual speech and how you incorporate thinking about that element into your practice of writing.
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B
So I think this is something that people can very much verify if they look at like different books of mine is that I think each project comes to me with a different format and how it's supposed to look. So I do. I mean, it's not immediate, but maybe, you know, even when you see like the Book of Interruptions, yes, it is one book, but it is, I want to say at least five projects, but each project. So for example, the first project, the Psychotic Notebooks, I wrote about 40 of them until I found, and I think I only included 11 until I found the shape of it. And that shape is sometimes imposed retroactively. And you know, again, like, not everything is just so intrinsic. Not everything just comes immediately. Sometimes you have to write, you know, 10, 11, 12, or something to think about how you want it presented. But I think in general I do. And this is something, this is something that's a little bit odd to say. But for example, one thing I do, I have like, maybe like 30 very specific pens. I'm a very big fan of pens. And when I change projects, so some of these I'm writing when I'm out, when I'm in the cafe, I also change the pens I sometimes change. Like if I'm writing in all block letters, if I'm writing in all, I sometimes change, you know, I have a new project and I instead of writing it In a big A4 page, I write it in a tiny, tiny, like you know, a 6 notebook. And all of these translate. It's just to change that mode of writing helps me change the mode in which I'm thinking in the beginning. And as it goes, it develops within itself. So that's how I, I think I've done it like that. I think at any point I usually have between five or six different free notebooks that when I want to write, I choose which one to write into and the size of the page, the whether or not it is, you know, lined, whether or not I'm writing in like ballpoint or fountain pen. These all will then affect how I will put them in a word document and paginate them and typeset them before it is sent to, you know, an actual typesetter, you know, later on a year or two later.
- [17:12]
A
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- [19:58]
B
I can say something very specific about this because I wrote this very specific poem. This is something that, you know, I'm gonna tell you, and, you know, we're gonna have this safe space between us. But the problem is stating these things. Sometimes these statements make it out into the wrong mouths and they are repeated by the wrong mouths. Especially like when people of color have certain discussions between themselves about what their culture represents in certain ways. So one thing that started in my second book, wedged and I carried into this, you know, 10 times, 20 times stronger, is that history and philosophy within our history doesn't always remain within the same. Same interactions to its people. And I will exactly pinpoint what I mean by that, which is that I think maybe the greatest. Sorry, not the greatest, greatest. Puts too much. It is too much of a word. I want to say the most common cultural export of, you know, Iran. And when. I'm sorry, it's not right to say Iran, but, you know, the perso Islamic world, maybe the most common cultural export of Sufism, you know, Rumi and All like Attar and all of those people. And Sufism is something that is a big point of thought for me and this book, for me, this poem entirely. First of all, let me read the entire poem. It's not that long. It's basically four lines longer than what you read. We sank into the floor, caressed by the beauty. When I say my hunger is ancient, it's not for poetic effect. A century defined in wars. So we've sold madness for bullets. But when I say I am hurting, you're caressed by its resonance with the natural Sink deeper into comfort. It is frequent, a fattening. It is a soothing frequency. So I was trying to pretty much get at Sufism, as, you know, Sufism, first of all, it is something that spans a thousand years. And it's hard to discuss it as a monolith. But Sufism is something that began as a grand transgression by, you know, someone that is often called a prophet within Sufism and Sufism as a practice of. As a religious practice, often, often, often quite violently squashed for centuries. It is basically a transgression against orthodox Islam. It was a grand transgression. And it came as through the centuries, through, you know, perhaps Coleman Barks, which is, you know, the person who is unfortunately known for letting Rumi into the world. And now it has become a tool for soothing oneself against political thought, you know. So, for example, I will say something about Rumi, and this is something that was very central to me writing this is that Abdulkarim Surusheh, one of the great Rumi scholars, says something about Rumi. Szad says that most of our R as in Persian, most Persian language poets write in a basmi, or soothing frequency, so they can lull you into security. You read the poems and you are. You find some security within yourself. But what Rumi does is that he writes in a rasmi or militant or rousing frequency. So he. When he writes, you find it difficult to sit because it is. With every word, it is rousing the reader into action. Because Rumi was a profoundly unhappy person because in his 40s he realized he has basically, you know, wasted his life. So this poetry that is so deeply based in. And what he uses in his ghazals more than anything is this phrasing called zi ro zabay to upend one's life. He uses that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times to change one's life, to get up, do something. And it is interesting to me that these poets are now used to say, oh, you are feeling anxious against this world. Here, here's a poem about arose and the beloved and the sun. And now you can feel okay and not worry that there is hunger, that there is war, that there is oppression. And that's what I mean when I say, you know, philosophy doesn't always remain within the same relationship to its people. And I really wanted to explore that, that, that whole idea of mystic. And this is. Sorry, this is twofold because on the one side I'm talking about, you know. Yes. Like the Kolman barks, the English language readers who are perhaps not more well read into what Rumi translations are better and are reading the reductive parts. But also within the Iranian community, that mysticism has become a certain cop out of, you know, usually like those people who seek those mystic gatherings tend to be the least politically inclined of the bunch. They're seeking those mystic gatherings to again seek some security within themselves, seek some soothing frequencies that they can say, it's okay, it's okay that this country is going this way, that this world is this way, that we are dying under colonialism and heteropatriarchy and climate change. But it's okay because I am a mystic and it goes so profoundly against everything that I believe these have come from.
- [26:24]
A
Yeah, that's a really wonderful answer. And I was wondering if at this point you would read to us a little bit more from your collections. I really want to give our less listeners a chance to be immersed more in your work and feel this experience for themselves. I feel like we. What you are saying and your position is very clear within your poems, I.
- [26:46]
B
Think more important than anything. I think in general, it's like writing a book of essays first and then writing an introduction, which you do at the end. So I wrote the. I'm going to read the introductory poem, which is not a part of any of the projects, but it's something that, you know, it was originally called dramatis personae to a point of, you know, introducing everything. In this book now it's called Before We Begin and it begins, this book of poetry, the poet's hand softens the glare of the sun. A city breathing in the wake of prophets, prisoners of wars who never learned the lingua franca. A thief's hand is caught, a shaykh comes to rescue with anecdotes his worn out sandals, A vestigium to illuminate the passerby's mind. The witness, now bright with necessity, feeds the prisoner his last drop of water and sets sail a tower of silence. And the high priestess, accustomed to blood rot A car passes miles away. The priestess stares on as the businessmen fall into predestination. Their bucket list leading to the vagrant's cabin bloomed crimson with the bleeding of lantern light. In the swamp nearby, the farmer's fear ripens and breathing in the sky, the martyr speaks of return scribed in stone by the historian to persevere as material. And it is in the name of the greatest insurgents we now call tradition that the psychoanalyst will tilt his chair and make an induction. Or perhaps the ancient desire for the idol was far too libidinal, an excess marked for the chaining of the insurgent to the gates of a city breathing in the wake of poets imprisoned in their predestination. The blacksmiths shall die blacksmiths. And the merchants shall birth merchants during the dark hours, that abysmal volatile. The bandit jumps a fence in the blink of an eye, becomes the pornographer of this predicament, a shadow play produced at the gates of a city breathing in the wake of madness, the only true heir to the divine through the psychotics binocular. Ha. We spoke divinity. The idol no trespasser had snatched from the maw a cave where Rostam slew the white div, infinite in its capacity for madness, speaks louder than any thought that can penetrate rock. When the cavemen painted deer on these walls, they were pushing towards something unyielding. Still unyielding, the psychotic assures we should pay no mind. Generations wasted on mystery of death when one does not yet know how to hold the dagger at the neck of a city that screams and screams and screams.
- [29:50]
A
Thank you so much that. Can you talk to us a little bit more about city screaming? Because I find that to be a very. I don't live in a city anymore. I live in rustic, bucolic rural life. There is no screaming, except if my goats see me and want cheesies, you know, screaming for treatsomes. But I do find cities fascinating and absorbing and loud. And I don't know, when I was reading about the cities screaming in general, I felt. And Toronto's only city I That's not. I lived in Kingston, but if anyone's ever lived in Kingston, Ontario, it's not much of a city for screaming, I'd say, but for Toronto or any city, I would love to talk about that imagery and how it plays out. Because if there's a word I could use to describe your work and it is in the best possible way, like when I say you're the doctor Strange of poetry opening different dimensions, I'd Say I'm consistently and delightfully unsettled. And when I think about. And I think people need to be unsettled. So again, this isn't a complaint. It's a good thing. When talking about city screaming, that is something I thought about a lot from the time I read the description of your book to when I read that introduction.
- [31:01]
B
So, you know, when you said unsettled, that reminds me, you know, like, cities are a big part of where we find, you know, security personnel and the act of, you know, making the people civil. And when I say civil, I mean it in the most derogatory way possible. Like, as in, you know, when, you know, civil. If you've ever heard the term civilizing, the imagination, you know, as in to completely remove any potential against what has been set into place and the status quo within. I don't know. I think it's just also that I was called a flanner by a friend a year ago, and I never thought about it like that. But in general, I really. I do consider myself, like, just out loose in the city all the time. And the city is a big part of my everything. I think the only thing that is in every single one of my books is this whole. This idea of the city and how it interacts with the systems of all the greater systems that govern us. Because the city is the most palpable place for it. I'm not saying it doesn't exist elsewhere, but all the great machinery. When I say great, again, let's say large machinery. All the large machinery that governs us and the security personnel that kind of typify this epoch of us living together in small spaces. It all goes back to the city and how it interacts with its greater natural ecosystem. Natural ecosystem. I also mean the people. I don't mean trees and everything. I. I mean, it's in a bit of a biomechanical way, the natural ecosystem that makes the city work. You know, I also mean it's buses and cars and everything. You know, I don't. I'm not talking about ponds and clouds. I don't know. I've always found myself going back to that. I've always found myself going back and writing about the city and everything. I write every time.
- [33:26]
A
Yeah, it's definitely a striking third line. And I mean, I think one of the first books I read of yours was wjd and then there was a. It was a translation also of the Ocean Dweller, published with Gordon Press. I was pretty much hooked after that. I reviewed it. I was in and for me, it is always a thrill to find poets and poetry that make me feel home and how disturbed I am about the world, which I understand sounds counterintuitive to be at home and unsettled, but to me it's not. I'm perpetually in a state of being unsettled. So to see it acknowledged and explored and illuminated and having questions asked without necessarily providing that answers is something that I really appreciate about all of your work. So obviously thank you for that. My next and final question, actually for you is about what are you working on now? Because you're always up to something, Cass.
- [34:37]
B
So I'm. I think at this point in the next few months, I'm going to be starting edits on my next book, which is coming out with Acidoctrin Press. But I think that book is very, very much like 99% done. So I don't foresee myself working on that too much. I have another full length that I finished, but I am considering. I'm just looking at it because it is full length in terms of pages, but I'm not enjoying everything within it. So I am trying to make that a better book before I consider doing anything with it. And then I always have my daily writing. My daily writing. I just usually see, you know, sometimes I write a poem a day and, you know, I realize I don't want to publish it, so I just put three lines from it on my Instagram and that's it. And I also find a lot of, you know, I'm also reading always, you know, especially I'm reading a lot more history right now. So that is everything that I'm working on. But I'm always working, I'm always writing.
- [35:47]
A
I do love your Instagram shares. I always feel like I've walked into a room, like I'm going through a door. I know I'm going to walk into a new room, but whatever I'm going to find is usually going to knock me on my butt. Like, what. What just happened? You shared something on Facebook recently which was like an antidote or something. And I was like, what the heck did I just double into? And it's imprinted in my brain forever. It was very powerful. You have to follow, cast everyone to. To. Not necessarily on Facebook, but on Instagram, to be a. To be witness to the. To this wonderful treat. And I suggest that you do. You never know what you're going to get. There's nothing predictable about it. Yes, thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your really remarkable poetry collection. The Book of Interruptions, which everyone was published with Walsack and win in 2025 and is available wherever books are bought or borrowed. Kessel, thank you again.
- [36:47]
B
Thank you very much for having me.