New Books In Poetry

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with poet Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi about his new poetry collection, The Book of Interruptions. In The Book of Interruptions (Buckrider Books, 2025) Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi has brought together a collection of poems written with scalpel-like precision. Infused with “pre-emptive violence” these poems mark the intersection of war, immigration, sexuality and history, with lines often placed at the crossroads of Perso-Islamic and Western thought. Moving between an Iran that is marked with “tulips from the martyr’s blood” and Toronto, a city that is always screaming but where the author is a “ghost, anecdotal,” Mohammadi writes unflinchingly of the reality that faces them and others like them who straddle two worlds. But within this fierce collection there is also room for art, and for pleasure, and for words that invite us all with “gentle patterns of light against light against light.” Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (they/them) is a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-b