INSOMNIAC, by the Iranian-German author and poet Sam Vaseghi, is a collection of exile poems, gathered in the period of 2006 to 2016, during the poet's stay in Germany and Sweden. The poems have social and political relevance and reflect a bipolar vecu of the poet split between Europe and Iran. Some of these poems have been published earlier in journals such as Envoi by Cinamon Press, Prosopisia, or International Poetry Review. Many of the poems also have been written bilingual, and have a counterpart published either in Farsi or Spanish.
About the Author: Sam Vaseghi was born 1967 in Teheran, living his early childhood in Teheran and Stuttgart (Germany). 1973 he returned with his parents to Rasht (Iran), where he lived until 1983. In this time he experienced the late dictatorship period of the Shah, the revolution 1979 and the first years of the Iran-Iraq war. 1983 he returned to Germany and completed 1987 his German bachelor and until 2000 his studies in Engineering and Biological Sciences at the University of Stuttgart. In parallel, during this period he was a classical composition scholar of the renowned German composer Werner Müller and a canto scholar of the French-American singer Frederique Barbier at the Stuttgart Music Academy, where he was specializing in classical composition and the techniques of Sprechgesang. In the years 1992 to 2000, during several stays in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Montreal he began to intensify his literary work in Farsi, Spanish, English, and German. From 1994, numerous literary contributions were developed: Among others translations of Iranian master poetry to German and English, translation of German and Spanish poetry to Farsi, presentations of own poetry projects in Farsi, English and German. One of his latest multilingual literature projects is the recently launched work-in-progress platform www.antipoetry.com, aiming at challenging multilingual literature on the crossroads of prose and poetry, using deconstructivistic methods. 1998 he travelled for the last time to Iran, left immediately thereafter the country under risk and returned consciously to the German and later Swedish exile. Since then Sam Vaseghi is an active member of the Iranian Writer's Association (in Exile) -Kanune Nevisandegane Iran- as well as the Iranian PEN Center (in Exile). Continuing his travels around the globe, since 2003 he is engaged with networking of Iranian Exile Writers and the Foundation of the Archives of Iranian Writers in Exile and the Iranian Burnt Books Foundation. In 2004 he founded Iran Open Publishing Group, one of the most celebrated publishing houses of Iranian literature worldwide. Sam Vaseghi's poetry has been published in several journals (e.g. latest featured late 2015 by Envoi / Cinamon Press) and as poetry books (e.g. l'Aleph) in different languages (English, German, Farsi), among other: ENGLISH: http: //www.cinnamonpress.com/envoi GERMAN: http: //l-aleph.com/ FARSI: http: //antipoetry.com/