Defining one’s own identity as a diasporic self in foreign country is a complex issue. But poetry came helpful to Shirin Neshat and Maryam Habibian: they used Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad to express themselves in a context where they hadn’t grown up. In an interesting article Jasmin Darznik explores the legacy of Forough Farrokhzad (1935–1967) in the Iranian American diaspora. The abstract of her study reads: “At once political and poetic, particular and universal, Farrokhzad’s oeuvre has in recent years become a vital coordinate for a number of contemporary Iranian American women exploring issues of gender, faith, social justice, and human rights across historical and cultural boundaries”. She argues “that the imaginative recovery of Farrokhzad by Iranian immigrant women writers and artists not only complicates the West’s frequently reductive contemporary representations of Middle Eastern women, but marks a bold and evolving interface between modernist Iranian literature and contemporary Iranian immigrant literature”. Thus Darnznik makes an interesting point: migrants to the United States working as artists, use the important literary tradition of their own roots for their work of art. …