The Last Kiss is a bilingual Persian–English poetry collection by Iranian poet Mehdi Mousavi, translated by Fatemeh Ekhtesari and edited by Samuel Tongue.
But the project extends beyond the publication itself.
The collection emerged through years of collaboration shaped by exile, censorship, translation, and the challenge of carrying politically and emotionally charged writing across languages and borders without losing its urgency or cultural specificity.
Mousavi is widely recognised as one of the most significant contemporary Persian poets associated with the postmodern ghazal movement. His work has long challenged political authority and social repression in Iran.
For his writing, he was arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and sentenced to prison and lashes before eventually fleeing Iran while on bail. He now lives in exile in Norway.
The poems collected in The Last Kiss are rooted in lived experience — not only of repression, but also of displacement, longing, memory, and survival. They move between personal intimacy and political reality, often collapsing the distance between the two.
The English edition was developed over an extended collaborative process involving translation, editing, discussion, and reinterpretation across Persian and English literary traditions. Particular attention was given to preserving both the lyricism and the sharp political edge of the original work.
Alongside the publication itself, the wider project has included:
The project reflects Sic Publishing’s wider interest in literature not simply as art object, but as testimony, cultural memory, and public conversation.