Granny Cloud

by Farnoosh Fathi

A playful, ecstatic, and invigorating collection of lyrical work by one of America's finest young poets.In Granny Cloud, Farnoosh Fathi presents poetry as the pursuit of one’s highest attention, of freedom in formlessness, and joy in surrender. Like the dispirited court tumbler in the French medieval legend said to have inspired St. Francis’s eponymous “Jongleurs de Dieu” who takes up a daily ritual of tumbling on his hands in a dark cave before a portrait of the Virgin Mary, Fathi renews our faith in the lyric imagination through wild headstands and handsprings of impishly erotic language “soiled in fecal rhymes.” The title of her book links to both the progressive cloud-based educational program in India and the “grandmaternal mind” in Zen Buddhism—a mind that is tender, equanimous, and free to be absorbed by everything one encounters. Iterations of lines tumble from poem to poem through repeated portraits of home and children, peas and baldness, worms, spiders, and snails that collect in a salivating grand cloud of lyric reinvention. The cave of her own lyric process is foregrounded in the long poem of the third and last section “Anyone’s Don’tanelle” that tracks the drafts and do-overs of the writing of the poem “Fontanelle” that appears in the first section. In poem after poem, Granny Cloud raises a stained-glass popsicle to whatever inner chariot that carries the lyric spark through the ecstatic housekeeping of the word.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

Published September 24, 2024

Reviews

[Ben Rowe]

Some poetry collections really benefit if you have the "code" or context to crack the meaning that the author is getting to. Without cracking the code you are left with a mixture of images without the glue to link them together and provide meaning.

Sometimes you can get round this with close and repeat reading. Sometimes knowing a few biographical details etc.

With this collection which was filled with playful, surrealist images I never really cracked the code. So this felt a unique book but not one I was really able to fully make sense of.

[Jack Malik · Rating 3 out of 5]

A trippy collection. Almost 80% I couldn’t understand what did Fathi was going on about. Lots of times the mention of anal/anus. Nonetheless, I enjoyed Eau d’Lol, Dinnerwise, A Nerve Flosses the Alley (the Alley, Nerve), and Heyday’s Vows.


Anyone’s Don’tanelle is a brilliant concept, but I felt it would’ve been better if Fathi ended it with a her lines at page 81:

“Like berries or trips to the fontanelle. There are so many / paths to part one’s way there. I and a cry, repeat ourselves. / I don’t know my way back or why.”

Personally, I think this is one of the most beautiful part of the book; imagine to end with a banger like this instead of going on for another few more pages with an anti-climatic end.

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

i would like to be a student of this book. fathi's lines deftly weave together the hidden or less patently obvious tendrils of words into trellises--out of which may grow... a heart? a pen? a student, momentarily brave?

excellent use of "bald" & "pew" in this collection.

"I look at my hands and don't see God, that's how dense I am--life at its most glass-bottomed green."

[Conor Ryan]

reading this collection made me feel like i was losing my mind. wildly surreal and challenging with lots of little moments that stopped me in my tracks.

has the lines:
"I am swallowing your talk in in little pillows
as I bong-rip your soul"

which has to be one of the top ten things i am extremely jealous of not writing myself.

[Rian Matanky-Becker · Rating 2 out of 5]

The language in this poetry collection has been described as ‘rambunctious’ and I’d agree with that. However, the person who used that word meant it in a good way, whereas I didnt enjoy the collection that much overall.

To be fair to Fathi, I’m not very well read in poetry and reading this was part of my objective for the year to read more poetry and maybe this wasn’t the right place to start…

Also to be fair to Fathi I enjoyed the last piece which exposed the drafting process and turned the process itself into form.