Kalbasi’s poetry is generous and abundantly human, passionate and compassionate.

— Jimmy Santiago Baca, award winning poet and author of Immigrants in Our Own Land

Sheema Kalbasi’s debut collection documents her struggle to confront the past and absorb a new culture.  Born in Iran and now living in the United States, she handles complex threads of the Middle Eastern tapestry (which she refers to in “Kaddish” as God’s “bloody sore”) and weaves her own vivid fabric within it.  Part chronicle of losses, self-doubt, and of what is retained (family), part polemic against an oppressive past and quest for her own identity, Kalbasi’s concluding account of a passionate interlude reveals her evolving consciousness.

— D. H. MELHEM, author of New York Poems, Rest In Love, Blight and Stigma And The Cave: Two Novels

Sheema Kalbasi’s poems speak of love, loss, and life in exile. They are the poems of a human rights activist passionate with the hope of peace. Kalbasi’s poetry exposes the deep heart of a woman who is compassionate with suffering and full of the joy of life, of the innocence of a child, the knowledge of a woman, the aspirations of a peacemaker. These are stirring poems with a worldly view, both accessible and imaginative. They make an excellent cross-cultural exchange that demonstrates our universal humanity.

— Daniela Gioseffi, American Book Award Winning Author of Women On War: International Writings

In her poem, “New England” Sheema Kalbasi writes:

She slips the shelves and shadows
of her newfound friends within
the walls of her nights dream before another
summer-morning lights the start of the day
and through this steady music and bright vision we enter the world of a fine
poet, who, like her daughter, dances among, and slips the shadows and
shelves of both her heritage and her new home to become something
startlingly fresh and vibrant. A beautiful book.  An important new voice.

— Dr. Joel B. Peckham, Jr., Department of American Literature, University of Cincinnati, Clermont College and author of Night Walking and Asleep At The Wheel

Sheema Kalbasi’s poems attest to our tragic situation in which exile becomes a privileged position for pointing out the prevalent injustice of displacement. Her deeply engaging and reflective poems allow us to wrest away the very idea of homecoming in a world that denies it.

— Dr. Peyman Vahabzadeh, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Department of Sociology University of Victoria, author of Articulated Experiences: Toward a Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements

In an age of extremes, be they from the right or the left, from any and all religions, it is rare to hear a voice of reason, mature and graceful. Sheema Kalbasi has that voice. Echoes in Exile is a cry in the wilderness, an oratorio Kalbasi says she needs to “write to keep nothing from overloading nothing.” We learn more about the world in these poems, and thus, about ourselves.

— Daniel Y. Harris, M. Div, lecturer, essayist, poet and translator

Through compassion and wisdom she weaves the world together with her vivid words. World history is not national, it is international, and in her words, I found traces of my history, my life, my grief, and my desires. Sheema, a world citizen, shows in this powerful book, that just as the Earth is gold at its core, moving hot liquid, she does too.

— Birgitta Jonsdottir, poet and editor

There are honest & hard won poems here. They speak of pain & cruelty & loss, the very elements that separate us from each other - to our mutual sorrow. There is also love & hope for redemption. Heartfelt & true.

— Roger Aplon, poet and auithor of The Man With His Back To The Room and Intimacies

Sheema Kalbasi belongs to that world-wide community of the passionate and caring, who write of exile, injustice and desire.

— Wayne Amtzis, poet and editor

Ms. Kalbasi’s remarkably open volume of poetry, Echoes in Exile, dwells on justice, humanity, a "sublime divine" love for her daughter and mother (beautifully rendered in "Mama in the War"), an affair gone awry, seasons, a revolution lived through, exile, and loss.

“I am not good in the game of heart. I am a simple girl. I said. he said:
Sheema.....”
“I write what you can’t write
my name: Sheema.

“I will never influence my child the way I was influenced by the World
events.
I will be telling her the story of a kiss by a leaf descending on the skin
of a sleeping beauty in the gardens of Persia.”

“Nothing is eternal. Not family, not friendships, not love, not lust. Nothing... not even the wandering eyes that will read these lines in wonder. His love is my story.”

Her story is the story of love, achingly written.

 — Katayoon Zandvakili, award winning poet

Already, this new century seems as deafened by ideological clamour as the last, plagued by residues of cultural and literary separatism sometimes bordering on a kind of 'aesthetic apartheid'.  For nations increasingly brought face-to-face across cultural divides - chasms that are now as much internal as external - the need for conversation, on its many levels, has never been more essential.  Poetry, with its potential for radical openness and self-revelation, is an ideal prompt and vehicle for that conversation.  Many kinds of voice continue to lie dormant in the English-speaking world; but we have at least begun to witness, in more recent times, some breakings of silence.  In its quiet, intimate way, Echoes in Exile reverberates with that desire to speak up.  Of Iranian descent, Kalbasi is one of a swelling stream of poets now beginning to establish the conversation's many-sidedness.

— Dr. Mario Petrucci, BBC Radio 3's Poet In Residence, award winning poet and author of Heavy Water