The Wrong Person to Ask
Marjorie Lotfi
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From the publisher
Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2021
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation
Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest.
‘Lotfi’s imagistically rich debut collection moves from her childhood in Iran, where her family were uprooted by the revolution, to her youth in America and her current home in Scotland. Lotfi is sensitively attuned to the painful dislocation of self that can come from moving between different nations … Again and again her radiant language turns over the loss of family intimacy and identity caused by political upheaval and violence … Lotfi’s book mourns these losses and separations, while at the same time rendering the possibilities of a capacious, multifaceted sense of belonging: “And what is home if not the choice – / over and over again – to stay?”’ – Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian (Best recent poetry roundup), on The Wrong Person to Ask
‘The Wrong Person to Ask is a narrative arc of exile and homecoming […] Lotfi’s poetics of compassion challenges us to reconsider the nature of home for the migratory subject, asserting a new concept of belonging that dances between rooting and rootlessness.’ – Orla Polten, New Internationalist
'Marjorie Lofti’s debut collection portrays lives that find themselves, again and again, on the wrong side of history, compelled to preserve their own stories [...] Awarded the James Berry Poetry Prize and a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, the collection of emigration shimmers with ‘what remains’.' - Lesley Sharpe, The Alchemy Spoon, on The Wrong Person to Ask
'Loss echoes through this collection; loved ones, the voices of the many lost at sea trying to find a safe haven, or national (collective) moments of grief. Home is a sense of absence a well as being present but Lotfi leaves a light ablaze, "like a candle in a cathedral, for the keeping of vigil".' – Roy McFarlane, Selector, Poetry Book Society, PBS Winter 2023 Bulletin
‘Against this backdrop of rigid political boundaries, Lotfi’s collection is also in intimate conversation with the natural world, a relationship which offers new ways of understanding emplacement beyond ideas of nationhood.’ – Andrés Ordorica, The Skinny, on The Wrong Person to Ask