• The Book of Interruptions

The Book of Interruptions

by Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi

October 7, 2025 | ISBN 978-1-998408-25-2 | 96 Pages

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In The Book of Interruptions 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… Read more

Advance Praise

“Among young diasporic poets working in Canada, very few evince as deep an engagement as Khashayar Mohammadi with the philosophy, literary criticism and poetry of their inherited language and its cultural traditions while insisting as rigorously on asking, how does this inheritance equip the poet to confront and survive the present? Carried in the body, contrasted with devastating state violence in post-revolutionary Iran, are the luminous ideals of the Persianate tradition worth the emotional toll of their freight? Alternating with the poet’s intimately confessional voice, The Book of Interruptions reads like a series of invocations against the collective political dangers of nostalgia and forgetting.” – Rahat Kurd, author of The Book of Z

Click here to read an excerpt of The Book of Interruptions.

Events with Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi

    • Stop Right There (Selena Mercuri, Literary Review of Canada, 02/12/2025)
      "Ultimately, what emerges is poetry that begins and breaks, self-dissects, and starts again, offering up language attuned to the ruptures we inhabit, those that insist on remaining open."
    • Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, The Book of Interruptions (rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog, 13/11/2025)
      "With each collection, Mohammadi furthers a complexity of their engagement with the long poem, the book-length accumulated lyric, a trajectory that is as striking as it is propulsive."
    • What We're Reading: Staff Writers' Picks, Fall and Future (Hamilton Review of Books, 10/11/2025)
      We're delighted to see Khashayar Mohammadi's The Book of Interruptions in this mix.
    • Stop Right There (Selena Mercuri, Literary Review of Canada, 02/12/2025)
      "Ultimately, what emerges is poetry that begins and breaks, self-dissects, and starts again, offering up language attuned to the ruptures we inhabit, those that insist on remaining open."
    • Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, The Book of Interruptions (rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog, 13/11/2025)
      "With each collection, Mohammadi furthers a complexity of their engagement with the long poem, the book-length accumulated lyric, a trajectory that is as striking as it is propulsive."
    • What We're Reading: Staff Writers' Picks, Fall and Future (Hamilton Review of Books, 10/11/2025)
      We're delighted to see Khashayar Mohammadi's The Book of Interruptions in this mix.
    • 34 works of Canadian poetry coming out in fall 2025 (CBC Books, 29/09/2025)
      Kess's book is a Canadian poetry collection the CBC is excited about in fall 2025.

  • Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (they/them) is a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer and translator. They are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Award and the author of nine chapbooks of poetry. The Book of Interruptions is their fifth poetry book.