"The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi is a wondrous treasure – elegant poems of great tenderness and detail, vivid in heart and imagery, mesmerizing in power. Whole worlds and people shimmer alive through scenes and stories of exile, departure, arrival, but most importantly, clear witness and remembrance. A deeply honoring book fully built of love."—Naomi Shihab Nye

‘In this unforgettable and assured debut collection, Lotfi explores issues of belonging and identity – firstly the lost world of an Iranian childhood through the eyes of a young refugee and ultimately the found worlds of America and Scotland. She brilliantly illustrates the little tragedies of global politics by focussing on the luminous, ordinary rituals of daily life. These are poems built both to haunt and reaffirm us; poems of the living, breathing world and our overarching right to find a home in it.’ – John Glenday

‘The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi moves effortlessly across time and space to revisit experiences of displacement and exile during the Iranian revolution. It also examines the contours of her current home in Scotland through meditations and memories of family and migration. Knowingly, tenderly, and not without pain, these poems are reflections on place and the complicated feelings that accompany leaving a place and arriving elsewhere.  The Wrong Person to Ask is as precise as it is dynamic; every line is exact, and each image carefully sculpted.’ – Alycia Pirmohamed, on behalf of the Forward Prize Judges

'...my stand-out book of the year is Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection of poems, The Wrong Person to Ask. [...] Shaped by her migrations from Iran to America to Scotland, her poems are meditations on the themes of exile, refuge, memory, place, and the pressing grip of what has gone. They are beautiful.' – Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York, Church Times (Books of the Year 2024)

‘Against this backdrop of rigid political boundaries, Lotfi’s collection is also in intimate conversation with the natural world, a relationship which offers new ways of understanding emplacement beyond ideas of nationhood.’ - Andrés Ordorica, The Skinny

‘The poems span her childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran, years spent in the United States and her current life in Scotland. With such a globe-spanning personal history there is, inevitably, much questioning of what constitutes home and identity.’ – The Scotsman

‘Lotfi’s imagistically rich debut collection moves from her childhood in Iran, where her family were uprooted by the revolution, to her youth in America and her current home in Scotland. Lotfi is sensitively attuned to the painful dislocation of self that can come from moving between different nations … Again and again her radiant language turns over the loss of family intimacy and identity caused by political upheaval and violence … Lotfi’s book mourns these losses and separations, while at the same time rendering the possibilities of a capacious, multifaceted sense of belonging: “And what is home if not the choice – / over and over again – to stay?”’ - Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian (Books of the Month, The best recent poetry)

‘Marjorie Lotfi’s first full-length collection, The Wrong Person to Ask is a clear-eyed, sometimes productively reticent debut, and was one of three winners of the James Berry Poetry prize… Lotfi is a quiet and faithful witness. There is no self-indulgent introspection. She insists on seeing what she sees.’ – Carol Rumens, The Guardian (Poem of the Week)

'Loss echoes through this collection; loved ones, the voices of the many lost at sea trying to find a safe haven, or national (collective) moments of grief. Home is a sense of absence a well as being present but Lotfi leaves a light ablaze, "like a candle in a cathedral, for the keeping of vigil".' – Roy McFarlane, Selector, Poetry Book Society, PBS Winter Bulletin 2023, on The Wrong Person to Ask

‘Lotfi’s poetry embraces uncertainty, spanning continents and histories, often grounding itself in the wider connections between people and places ... The Wrong Person to Ask challenges us on what we expect from poetry, and poets, in an elegant and unforgettable way.’ — Sean Wai Keung, Gutter

‘This debut title comes to terms with displacement and settlement […] using the contours of Lotfi and her family’s journeys to put together a collection that is full of heart even as it tackles tough political themes.’ – Gail Low, DURA (Dundee University Review of the Arts)

‘The Wrong Person to Ask is a narrative arc of exile and homecoming […] Lotfi’s poetics of compassion challenges us to reconsider the nature of home for the migratory subject, asserting a new concept of belonging that dances between rooting and rootlessness.’ – Orla Polten, New Internationalist

'Marjorie Lofti’s debut collection portrays lives that find themselves, again and again, on the wrong side of history, compelled to preserve their own stories [...] Awarded the James Berry Poetry Prize and a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, the collection of emigration shimmers with ‘what remains’.' - Lesley Sharpe, The Alchemy Spoon

‘The question of any exile — where is home? — is a theme running through the whole collection.’ – Ruth Aylett, Morning Star

‘It's this depth that I’ve found most satisfying in Lotfi’s work, the way her past is inescapable and shapes her thinking about the present. […] Lotfi’s work is too nuanced, too reflective, to insist on a single answer. She isn’t the right person to ask because she knows how complicated the whole question is which may, paradoxically, make her exactly the right person to ask. These poems are her answer. They speak directly to the reader, which is what makes them so memorable. And they are relevant: just look at the news.’ – DA Prince, The Friday Poem

Marjorie Lotfi was born in New Orleans, moved to Tehran as a baby with her American mother and Persian father, and fled Iran with one suitcase and an hour's notice during the Iranian Revolution. After waiting with family for her father's return in her mother's tiny hometown in Ohio, she lived in different parts of the US before moving to New York as a young lawyer in 1996 and then back and forth to the UK, settling in the UK in 1999, and in Scotland in 2005. Her pamphlet Refuge, poems about her childhood in revolutionary Iran, was published by Tapsalteerie Press in 2018. She has been the Poet in Residence at Jupiter Artland, Spring Fling and the Wigtown Book Festival, and was commissioned to write Pilgrim, a sequence about migration between Iran and the US, for the St Magnus Festival in Orkney. She was one of the three winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021, and her first book-length collection, The Wrong Person to Ask, was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and  the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2024.

I
    13     Refuge
    14     On seeing Iran in the news, I want to say
    15     The Wrong Person to Ask
    16     Two Grandmothers
    17     Maman Bozorg
    18     The gun in its holster
    19     Riding the Line
    20     The Game
    21     Crossing the street for mother’s cigarettes
    22     Shut Out the Noise
    23     Packing for America
    24     Hope
    25     To the Airport
    26     Origin
    27     The Last Thing
    28     Alarm I
    29     Alarm II
    30     I  Picture of Girl and Small Boy (Burij, Gaza, 2014)
    31     II  Picture of Boy, Looking Away (Gaza, 2015)
    32     Gabriella’s Dream
    33     What You See in the Dark
    34     Wishbone
    35     Correction
    36     Destruction of the Forty Martyrs Cathedral, Aleppo, Syria
    37     Granddaughter, I entered your mother’s house
    38     Checkpoint, Matveyev Kurgan
    39     Khanoom

    40     The End of the Road
    40         i    [There’s a moment every morning]
    41         ii    [Each breath in this place]
    42         iii    [Every blade against the cutting-board]
    43         iv    [She takes her boys back every summer]
    44         v    [Even in this lack of light, she sees]
    45         vi    [The boys carry her good looks]
    46         vii    [In her eightieth year, she sees her sisters]

II
    49     Sea Gooseberry (Pleurobrachia)
    50     Sunday on the Luing Sound
    51     Number 9 Cullipool
    52     Sunflower
    53     Star of the Sea
    54     Williamina Fleming
    55     What Work Is
    56     Omega Centauri
    57     Drift
    58     Say It’s Nothing, Say It’s Rust
    59     Horizon
    60     Out to Sea
    61     When They Ask
    62     The Trunk
    63     After the Match
    64     The first thing he doesn’t forget
    65     The Unfinished House
    66     Storm Light
    67     The Last Keeper
    68     Citizen
    69     Moving
    70     And this is how it begins
    71     O Love!
    72     Edward Thomas on His Last Night with Helen
    73     Keep
    74     The Hebridean Crab Apple

    76     Acknowledgements