IMPURE THOUGHTS

By Golnoosh Nour

Riotous and fizzing with language, the poetry of Golnoosh Nour boldly explores what it is to be utterly alive and ecstatically, yet complicatedly, in desire. –Richard Scott
Impure Thoughts is a dizzying dance through impurity's several selves. Half bal masqué, half Grand Guignol, Nour confronts the limits of desire with an almost uncanny intensity of focus. Even at their most tender and elegiac these poems tremble with the white-hot heat of libidinal energy and gleam with oracular fury. –Fran Lock

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verve Poetry Press
• Release date: May 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913917760

Golnoosh Nour

Golnoosh Nour is a published poet, prose writer, and lecturer. Born in Tehran in 1988, she studied for a BA in English Literature at Shahid Beheshti University after which she moved to London to do an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck. In 2017, her debut poetry collection Sorrows of the Sun was published under her then pseudonym, Sogol Sur. Her short story collection The Ministry of Guidance and Other Stories was published on the 2nd of April 2020 by Muswell Press. Her writing has been anthologised in internationally recognised publications such as Granta. She has performed in numerous literary events across the UK and internationally, including The Shuffle at the Poetry Café, Stoke Newington Literature Festival, The Fringe! Festival, SOAS, RVT, Birkbeck Poetry Live for Arts Week, In Yer Ear, Literary Kitchen Festival, Tate South Lambeth Library, and the UCL Art Society. She has appeared in the BBC Cultural Frontline and Woman's Hour to discuss her work. Since May 2020, Golnoosh has been hosting and designing a radio programme called Queer Lit for Soho Radio Culture/ Alphabet Radio. Golnoosh is the co-editor of Magma 80 and one of the judges of the Queer Writing Competition of Muswell Press. In 2019, she gained her practice-based Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. Golnoosh teaches Creative Writing at Reading University. Her full collection, ROCKSONG, was published by VERVE Poetry Press in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Polaris Prize.

Book preview

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PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

https://vervepoetrypress.com

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All rights reserved

© 2022 Golnoosh Nour

The right of Golnoosh Nour to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED NOV 2022

Printed and bound in the UK

by Imprint Digital, Exeter

ISBN: 978-1-913917-21-0

ePub ISBN: 978-1-913917-76-0

Cover illustration by Sailor Stephens

insta: sailors.ghost

CONTENTS

Astrological Storms

Inventing Language

Cheap Tricks

Scorpio Sun

The Cursed Art of Storytelling

Religion

Anxious Dreams of Ambitious Little Deaths

Dogs Masquerading as Wolves

Cemetery

Dirty Moon

Men with Small Mouths

Reliquary

Vexed Vixen Tale

Let the Darkness Speak

Ode to Courage

Of Rumours and Regrets

Today Is the Day

Curious Circumstances

Juxtaposition

Towards Gods

Your Blood

‘Desire is no light thing.’

–Anne Carson

‘Toys, pets, boys... Inside each enchanting exterior was a vagueness that disappointed me night after night.’

–Dennis Cooper

‘I had a presentiment then that there is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain.’

–Yukio Mishima

IMPURE

THOUGHTS

Astrological Storms

I am what they call ex tremely bi sexual

‘extremely’ for I can only be an extremity or