About Esther | Ziba Press

Harvesting Questions
Writing my bio is a hard thing to do. The short version is: What was, is over with and what is, the poems and other works will tell us. The hardest is not asking: What was it that is over with? My work belongs to salvage art inventory, with forgotten damaged works of art in warehouses suddenly becoming valueless no longer art, legally worthless. Does my work truly tell us what is? Mostly it is freed from the market value without the drudgery of usefulness. Am I an artist from the Republic of Mermaids?

Esther Kamkar
Esther Kamkar was born in Tehran, Iran and lived in Jerusalem for seven years before emigrating to the United States. She has been a poet and artist for most of her life. She has lived in Palo Alto, California for many years and published three books of her poetry through her own imprint Ziba Press. Her poems have also appeared in anthologies and literary journals in the United States and abroad. To discover more about Esther, explore this website.

A poem with a museum
heart, its wings filled
with collections
of paper and clay
primeval.