Kaveh Bassiri’s Elementary English is a profound meditation on the urgencies of language, a confirmation that “the word remembers:’ It is a resonant bearing of witness, in a world where “272 million people are international migrants.” It is, in its loving remembrance of the grandmother who “became my first relative buried in the USA;” a transformation of loss into gift. “She begins again in someone else:” Elementary English affirms, and that someone else is the reader of Kaveh Bassiri’s wise and beautiful book.

What is it possible to say in English? Which poetic forms can be adapted to new truths? This book is exciting, not only because of its subjects and themes, but because Kaveh Bassiri is so adventurous in the way he stretches language, structure, and form. Only a poet with a rich vocabulary and healthy skepticism of English itself could have managed the feat.

In Kaveh Bassiri's second chapbook, Elementary English, we are invited into the ways that language expands and contracts, and the ways that the untranslatable can only be grasped in poetry. I found myself pulled in by images, by Persian expressions, "the yashmak of accents," by the ways Bassiri creates such beauty in the familiar and the estranging. This is a gorgeous collection that left me wanting more.

Reflections on Elementary English and “Conversation Practice”

Kaveh Bassiri describes his inspiration and process writing Elementary English.
(The Cincinnati Review, Jan 26, 2021)

Elementary English: Basic Lessons and Reading Exercises

Two poems from the chapbook, read by the author.
(Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 10, 2020)