Winner of the 2019 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award

 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.      — H. L. Hix

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.      —Kazim Ali