What do you think?
Rate this book
The Poet Game
In the wake of the first World Trade Center bombing, New York City is the center of an intricate web of betrayals and double-crosses in the shadowy world of Muslim radicals. Sami Amir arrives in Brooklyn via Iran, and into a world of militants, arms suppliers, and spies. He is a counter-intelligence agent from a branch of the Iranian Ministry of Security. The son of an American mother, he has always stood apart from his fellow men. Now, because of his background, he is sent to New York to investigate rumored terrorist plots that are to culminate with further violence around Christmas and New Year's, two weeks away.
- GenresFiction
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
1 person is currently reading
48 people want to read
About the author
Salar Abdoh
13 books84 followersSalar Abdoh is an author and writer. His latest novel is A Nearby Country Called Love (Viking Penguin, 2023). His book, Out of Mesopotamia (Akashic, 2020), has been hailed as “One of a handful of great modern war novels,” and was a NYTimes Editors’ Choice, and also selected as a Best Book of the year across several platforms, including Publishers Weekly. He is also the author of Tehran At Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game, and editor and translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir.
Mostly dividing his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran, Abdoh regularly publishes personal essays and short stories, plus numerous translations of other authors that appear in journals across the world.
A professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, he conducts workshops in the English Department’s MFA program and also directs undergraduate creative writing.
Mostly dividing his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran, Abdoh regularly publishes personal essays and short stories, plus numerous translations of other authors that appear in journals across the world.
A professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, he conducts workshops in the English Department’s MFA program and also directs undergraduate creative writing.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 21, 2017
In the late 1990s, I worked for a publisher specializing in books about Iran or by Persian authors, and so an advance copy of this crossed my desk. At the time, it didn't grab me, so I stuck it on my shelf, where it's sat for the last 17 years. Then, last year, I read and greatly enjoyed the author's most recent book, Tehran at Twilight, which prompted me to revisit this debut.
This time I finished it in a few days, but I can see why it failed to grab me the first time around. Although it more or less fits into the espionage genre in terms of subject matter and plot, it's much too slippery and elliptical to fit the modern reader's expectations of a "spy thriller." In broad terms, it's about an agent sent by a moderately-aligned Iranian intelligence unit to New York to try and undermine the efforts of a rival Iranian intelligence unit called Section 19. This latter group is seeking to inflame US-Iranian relations by helping a pan-Muslim terrorist cell set off a bomb in Manhattan.
But the hall of mirrors here is more of a maze of mirrors, as every character's identity and motivations slip through the reader's fingers. All of which makes it a bit tough to get invested in any of the characters. What makes the book interesting now, is that it was written pre-9/11, and its context is the original World Trade Center attacks and the Brooklyn mosque gang. The stew of Libyan, Lebanese, Pakistani, Iranian, and traitorous Americans and references to the Lockerbie bombing make the story feel much older than it actually is, given the attacks that happened a year after the book was published.
On the whole, the writing tries a little too hard to convey world-weary ennui, and there's a melodramatic climax that felt very forced. That said, the mindset behind the machinations of the various factions felt quite authentic, and it's perhaps worth reading for that alone, just to get a taste of how convoluted the thinking and beliefs can get. But I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it to most folks -- try Tehran at Twilight instead.
This time I finished it in a few days, but I can see why it failed to grab me the first time around. Although it more or less fits into the espionage genre in terms of subject matter and plot, it's much too slippery and elliptical to fit the modern reader's expectations of a "spy thriller." In broad terms, it's about an agent sent by a moderately-aligned Iranian intelligence unit to New York to try and undermine the efforts of a rival Iranian intelligence unit called Section 19. This latter group is seeking to inflame US-Iranian relations by helping a pan-Muslim terrorist cell set off a bomb in Manhattan.
But the hall of mirrors here is more of a maze of mirrors, as every character's identity and motivations slip through the reader's fingers. All of which makes it a bit tough to get invested in any of the characters. What makes the book interesting now, is that it was written pre-9/11, and its context is the original World Trade Center attacks and the Brooklyn mosque gang. The stew of Libyan, Lebanese, Pakistani, Iranian, and traitorous Americans and references to the Lockerbie bombing make the story feel much older than it actually is, given the attacks that happened a year after the book was published.
On the whole, the writing tries a little too hard to convey world-weary ennui, and there's a melodramatic climax that felt very forced. That said, the mindset behind the machinations of the various factions felt quite authentic, and it's perhaps worth reading for that alone, just to get a taste of how convoluted the thinking and beliefs can get. But I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it to most folks -- try Tehran at Twilight instead.
March 22, 2021
Tired of your predictably complex mix of American and British PI’s, cops, detective chief inspectors and their nemeses? Meet SamiAmir, an Iranian translator become internal Iranian spy who spies on fellow Iranian intelligence agents at the behest of his agency’s boss, The Colonel.
Sent to New York to follow and foil the terrorist exploits of a rival Iranian intelligence arm, Sami must find his way into multiple layers of mutually-suspicious, sometimes murderously competitive ‘allies’ in the war against the West. The layers of suspicion and mistrust are endless. Can Sami and American fellow spy Ellena learn to trust each other, foil the plot, and extricate themselves from the labyrinth of deceit to which their careers have been dedicated?
The Poet Game is a entertaining twist on the traditional Western spy novel.
Sent to New York to follow and foil the terrorist exploits of a rival Iranian intelligence arm, Sami must find his way into multiple layers of mutually-suspicious, sometimes murderously competitive ‘allies’ in the war against the West. The layers of suspicion and mistrust are endless. Can Sami and American fellow spy Ellena learn to trust each other, foil the plot, and extricate themselves from the labyrinth of deceit to which their careers have been dedicated?
The Poet Game is a entertaining twist on the traditional Western spy novel.
September 4, 2025
entertaining quick read
May 3, 2009
Abdoh's debut is a terse mess of a spy novel, obviously run through the contemporary fiction workshop mill and sucked clean of anything interesting. His prose is snappy, but these days snappy prose is not enough, especially in a book marketed as literary fiction. I suppose there's some sort of exotic allure, Abdoh and his narrator both being Iranian, but there's no sense of culture in any of the characters, so any claim of multiculturalism rings empty and false.
The narrator's tone is clueless and mystified with New York, and it's not immediately convincing that Abdoh is in control of this. Sami's judgements are generic - Damadi is fack, Joanna is ugly - but we don't get anything more rich than that, no motivation or drive. Some of the Brooklyn streets are rendered with convincing desolation and a touch of understanding of the NYPD. The dialogue is paced well and the greasy basements of falafel joints bring out the grit and small time nature of these Arab thugs.
Much of the spy detail seems straight of a 60s thriller, James Bond with no flair, pay phones with voice encoders, masked identities and triple crosses. Too much of Sami's conflict is an internal argument about who is who, and who is working for who, so his own thoughts contradict themselves in almost humorous Maxwell Smart ways. The generic sex-drenched spy shit is tempered, until Ellena, a mysterious and beautiful blonde poetess shows up, and the story becomes Hollywood as hell.
The worst sex scene of all time, starts out, "They began to kiss...like explorers. Then he penetrated her again." Abdoh shows a general lack of knowledge about human interactions and relations. The generic spy shit gets slppey when Ellena dances fetish at the club, though this might be the perfect kinky idiocy of the 90s coming out. The bloodshed is unbelievable, especially that Sami, an otherwise sympathetic character has no real problem with capping people. I don't even believe him as a spy, let along a killer.
Sami's moral compass, though he's not a muslim, is quite similar, in that it is more reprehensible for one to have whipped cream licked of one's body than to put a bullet into another human being's temple. The double-crossing convolutions become excessive and comedic along with the exploration of Sami's "American half."
The Poet Game is written like Abdoh wanted the shitty Hollywood adaptation to be pretty much word for word from the novel, and the silliness of the twisty plot culminates in Sami getting gunned down with Ellena. Are we supposed to feel sorry, or some sort of romantic release a la Bonnie and Clyde? I feel little to nothing.
The narrator's tone is clueless and mystified with New York, and it's not immediately convincing that Abdoh is in control of this. Sami's judgements are generic - Damadi is fack, Joanna is ugly - but we don't get anything more rich than that, no motivation or drive. Some of the Brooklyn streets are rendered with convincing desolation and a touch of understanding of the NYPD. The dialogue is paced well and the greasy basements of falafel joints bring out the grit and small time nature of these Arab thugs.
Much of the spy detail seems straight of a 60s thriller, James Bond with no flair, pay phones with voice encoders, masked identities and triple crosses. Too much of Sami's conflict is an internal argument about who is who, and who is working for who, so his own thoughts contradict themselves in almost humorous Maxwell Smart ways. The generic sex-drenched spy shit is tempered, until Ellena, a mysterious and beautiful blonde poetess shows up, and the story becomes Hollywood as hell.
The worst sex scene of all time, starts out, "They began to kiss...like explorers. Then he penetrated her again." Abdoh shows a general lack of knowledge about human interactions and relations. The generic spy shit gets slppey when Ellena dances fetish at the club, though this might be the perfect kinky idiocy of the 90s coming out. The bloodshed is unbelievable, especially that Sami, an otherwise sympathetic character has no real problem with capping people. I don't even believe him as a spy, let along a killer.
Sami's moral compass, though he's not a muslim, is quite similar, in that it is more reprehensible for one to have whipped cream licked of one's body than to put a bullet into another human being's temple. The double-crossing convolutions become excessive and comedic along with the exploration of Sami's "American half."
The Poet Game is written like Abdoh wanted the shitty Hollywood adaptation to be pretty much word for word from the novel, and the silliness of the twisty plot culminates in Sami getting gunned down with Ellena. Are we supposed to feel sorry, or some sort of romantic release a la Bonnie and Clyde? I feel little to nothing.
June 8, 2011
Not a big fan of spy novels and this one really wasn't very good anyways. It was written in a pulp fiction style and with the unusual names and the double and triple crosses it often was a bore to read. I had picked it up at a "seconds" book store and now I know why. Not a book I'd recommend or read again and the best thing I can say is that it did get better the farther in one went but I almost gave up after the first couple of chapters.
Read
April 29, 2012"I call it reaching to the heart of the matter. If I could split myself into ten different people, I'd be even happier. Sarajevo was an experience, so is being a stripper in New York. Experience teaches you detachment."
All the trust issues and double-crossings bored me, but Sami's identity crises as he wanders around New York City were fun to follow. Also, I liked the poem Ellena wrote:
Something moaned
In her?
No
Though it could have been the oud she plays
When he calls for her
All the trust issues and double-crossings bored me, but Sami's identity crises as he wanders around New York City were fun to follow. Also, I liked the poem Ellena wrote:
Something moaned
In her?
No
Though it could have been the oud she plays
When he calls for her
March 12, 2014
Seriously thee worst book I've ever read. If I didn't finish every book I started on principle, I wouldn't have made it through chapter one.
May 25, 2015
Prescient spy thriller about middle-eastern terrorists written shortly before 9/11. Snappily written, but with some serious plot and characterisation issues.
July 20, 2007
Salar is one of the unique writers & his imagination is just beyond the boundaries.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews