FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — An Iranian woman poet, a southerner, and a midwestener are represented in three new poetry collections published by the University of Arkansas Press.

For the first time, the work of Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad is being brought to English-speaking readers through the perspective of a translator who is a poet in her own right, fluent in both Persian and English, and intimately familiar with each culture. Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, translated by Sholeh Wolpe (cloth, $22.95) includes the entirety of Farrokhzad’s last book and selections from her earlier work.

Farrokhzad, who died in a car accident in France in 1967 at the age of thirty-two, was the most significant female Iranian poet of the twentieth century. She wrote with a sensuality and burgeoning political consciousness that pressed against the boundaries of what could be expressed by women in 1950s and 1960s Iran. But she paid a high price for her art. Her only child was taken away and she spent time in mental institutions. In her Foreword to the book, noted poet Alice Ostriker writes that Farrokhzad belongs in the company with Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Plath, and Sexton: “Torch passes to torch. . . . The shock of her poetry is the shock of purity, of ice water, of a corpse rotting in broad daylight.” Shloeh Wolpe lives in Los Angeles, California.

New to the University of Arkansas Press’s distinguished Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer, are R. T. Smith’s Outlaw Style (paper, $16.00) and Greg Rappleye’s Figured Dark (paper $16.00). The landscape and culture of the American South are presented for interrogation and understanding in Smith’s narrative and lyric poems. He takes us from the history of American racial intolerance, to a séance of voices involved with John Wilkes Booth, to

an exploration of the roots of traditional music.

    Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey calls Outlaw Style a “brave book.” Smith is a “poet enthralled to history and music, taking on the competing narrative of our American past, those many versions that, when acknowledged, get us closest to the truth.” Smith is the editor of the journal Shenandoah at Washington and Lee University,

     The voices in Greg Rappleye’s Figured Dark call across a vast landscape of myth, memory, and horrific wreckage. He is a poet who refuses easy categories. These poems are by turns wise, elegiac, ironic, and wickedly funny. Here are dreamy raptors, dome-lighted Firebirds, flaming bodies, junk cars, deadly archangels, the musician Brian Wilson, and a young John Berryman.

     Poet Dan Gerber says that Rappleye’s poems “come from an imagination without peer. There is nothing predictable about them.” And poet Steve Orlen says to “take a trip with Rappleye. In the darkness, you will find some light; you, too, will be held 'captive to some small happiness,’”

Greg Rappleye is corporation counsel for Ottawa County, Grand Haven, Michigan.