Storms women carry: a review of WHEN YOUR SKY RUNS INTO MINE , by
Rooja Mohassessy
Jeanne Yu
When Your Sky Runs Into Mine, by Rooja Mohassessy, Elixir Press, 2023.
In this ambitious debut, winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award, Rooja Mohassessy graciously brings us into the fold of her life as an Iranian American born in Iran. Her poetry is an ekphrastic dialogue with the artwork of her uncle, Bahman Mohassess (1931-2010), and pays homage to his vital role in her emigration to Europe during the Iran-Iraq war. Mohassessy’s poems delve into the disconnectedness that an immigrant faces when drastic culture change and coming-of-age collide. Her writing honors the women in her home country, and strives towards a reconciliation of war’s impact on their lives and families. Mohassessy’s creative poetics beckon and then immerse you into her well-crafted visually rich language. Mohassessy begins by retrieving childhood memories evoked by her uncle’s cubist and surrealism-inspired art (roojamohassessy. com/gallery). For her, these abstract figures embody the conflict of living in the political uncertainty of their native land. In “Hijab in Third Grade,” she gently invites us into her changing world.
Two stray ends of the night droop aimlessly at her chest. The lady gathers and ties them into a double knot, a lock
JEANNE YU
under the chin. It’s time to come to terms with the dark.
Mohassessy’s tightly woven sounds and lines attempt to make sense of internal contradictions. Here in “Before and After the Revolution,” she meditates on the western film “Dirty Dancing” soundtrack and the dire consequences for young women who step out of the new cultural order.
Young women are urged to keep still, not fiddle with their faces. Then stoning comes in vogue. Most, me included, miss out entirely on Swayze’s steps. Some friends of friends get ninety-nine lashes for playing the clandestine soundtrack past earshot, one lash for every name of God. Virgins get it the hardest—
In “Death Was Like Desire,” Mohassessy deftly takes us deeper into the tension between the external pressures of war and the wars internal to the minds of the women like herself:
. . . We’d raise our heads in praise of the blended colors of dawn, pull our chadors over our heads without a second thought, cup our hands before us, true, we asked mostly for the cup to pass from us, yet we kissed the cubed dirt
of Karbala and sipped on misfortune. We knew, no doubt we were undeserving—were taught
as much at school and for half a century prior. But we thought bitterness a remedy, a requisite part of the cure. . . .
Images convey eloquently throughout her collection how war becomes life in “Khorramshahr 1980”: “We were soft-fed the sweet dirt of our homeland, / each day some new blessings of war.”
Her parents remained in Iran when Mohassessy emigrated to Europe in the early 1980s. The second section of this collection begins to explore the complexity of separation from a known world into a new one. In the poem, “The Immigrant Leaving Home and Guilt,” she falls into the invitations of this new life, yet voices call her back:
. . . of a sermon, her voice old, thick as blood, the West woven in rhetoric of temptation. O how those lines tug still at my denim miniskirt each time I make to take my seat.
Mohassessy’s language shifts into a reflective tone. “At Twelve” considers how her family’s packages arriving in the mail reduce a distance, but how time begins to distance them as well.
I learned to treat it with reverence when it began to arrive with less then less frequency, the small sea-blue tin box casually wrapped in translucent wax paper, cross-tied with white cotton twine, the gray lead seal guarding it like a coffer of family treasures.
As the child becomes a woman, Mohassessy’s subject matter and poetic style release its tautness, allowing language and form to expand. In “Straniera,” she replaces the strict structure of punctuation with white space. This looser form parallels the transgressive freedoms of the subject matter of this poem.
JEANNE YU
her belly undoes the strap pulls the bikini top from under firmly pressing her breasts into the heat, the burn of transgressions and turns to bare sandy nipples to the world though no one is looking no cup-bearer waiting for a sacrificial offering of a swim top . . .
In the transition poem of this section, “Magnolia Grandiflora,” takes on the metaphor of womanhood, speaking to the future generations of blossoming women and her hope for their children, or pleasure. I’ll paint my lips, withhold my smile and make fallow expectations bleed, breed a race of men who make love as friends.
Throughout When Your Sky Runs Into Mine, Mohassessy enables us to see through a lens of a woman born in a country under turmoil. With her measured, thoughtful hand, we gain insight into the difficulty of growing up in tumultuous times, the ensuing tension of rapidly changing culture, the challenges of distance, and the continuing search over this traverse of who one is born to be. Mohassessy gives voice to the circumstances of mothers and daughters born into this world and their resilience, in light of what darkness they are asked to carry.
In the transition to the last and final section of the collection, Mohassessy simultaneously desires and laments the loss of connection to the past and negotiates what to retain. This remarkable collection, so beautifully given, is a gift to the world and an acknowledgement that the calls of the past are unrelenting, something that she is beginning to become at home with, as in “My Only Bangle.”
Today I celebrate my only bangle my one-hand applause the gold leaf on my family tree my hand-hammered heritage my blood. Today it refused to slide off . . .