Abacus of Loss: A Memoir in Verse

Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” It is in this vein that Sholeh Wolpé’s mesmerizing memoir in verse unfolds. In this lyrical and candid work, her fifth collection of poems, Wolpé invokes the abacus as an instrument of remembering. Through different countries and cultures, she carries us bead by bead on a journey of loss and triumph, love and exile. In the end, the tally is insight, not numbers, and we arrive at a place where nothing is too small for gratitude.

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Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian American poet, translator, playwright. She is the award-winning author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, Sin:Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad,and The Conference of the Birds. Currently a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine, Wolpé has lived in Iran, Trinidad, and the United Kingdom. She presently resides in Los Angeles and Barcelona.