| Kalbasi’s poetry is generous and abundantly human, passionate and compassionate.
— Jimmy Santiago Baca, award winning poet and author of Immigrants in Our Own Land
Sheema Kalbasi’s poems speak of love, loss, and life in exile. They are the poems of a human rights activist passionate with the hope of peace. Kalbasi’s poetry exposes the deep heart of a woman who is compassionate with suffering and full of the joy of life, of the innocence of a child, the knowledge of a woman, the aspirations of a peacemaker. These are stirring poems with a worldly view, both accessible and imaginative. They make an excellent cross-cultural exchange that demonstrates our universal humanity.
— Daniela Gioseffi, American Book Award Winning Author of Women On War: International Writings
Already, this new century seems as deafened by ideological clamour as the last, plagued by residues of cultural and literary separatism sometimes bordering on a kind of 'aesthetic apartheid'. For nations increasingly brought face-to-face across cultural divides - chasms that are now as much internal as external - the need for conversation, on its many levels, has never been more essential. Poetry, with its potential for radical openness and self-revelation, is an ideal prompt and vehicle for that conversation. Many kinds of voice continue to lie dormant in the English-speaking world; but we have at least begun to witness, in more recent times, some breakings of silence. In its quiet, intimate way, Echoes in Exile reverberates with that desire to speak up. Of Iranian descent, Kalbasi is one of a swelling stream of poets now beginning to establish the conversation's many-sidedness.
— Dr. Mario Petrucci, BBC Radio 3's Poet In Residence, award winning poet and author of Heavy Water
Sheema Kalbasi’s poems attest to our tragic situation in which exile becomes a privileged position for pointing out the prevalent injustice of displacement. Her deeply engaging and reflective poems allow us to wrest away the very idea of homecoming in a world that denies it.
— Dr. Peyman Vahabzadeh, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Department of Sociology University of Victoria, author of Articulated Experiences: Toward a Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements |
