Drawing extensively on Iranian poetic traditions and the history of their reception in English translation, Feast of the Ass presents a series of verses that play in the fields of love poetry’s address. Khajavi irreverently ruffles the "classical grandeur & quiet dignity" of inherited forms in order to consider the poet’s relationship to death, literature, race, religion, and sexuality, his "queer shoulder / set not to the wheel—so long, Solon!—but turned on to some bolder / axon."

"My mind is blown as I read this fabulous, fierce first collection by Jahan Khajavi. Queer, cunning, quirky, the poems are subtly imbued with the ghosts of Ginsberg and Wilde. They nearly burst at the seams (semes) with wordplay and wide-ranging imagery, but their artful containers show a poet deeply read in the traditions, a poet capable of wilfully and skilfully rhyming Persians and perversions, patois and fatwa. The lines are lyrical and lewd, and often simply lovely: 'These brimstone shaded poppies must be heaven sent— the garden setting fire to the palace gates.' The sacred and profane (aren’t they the same?) roll in the rumpled sheets, 'a mosque as scented martyr sainted as your hair.' Anyone who’s ever wished to write a ghazal or a rubaiyat: read this book and learn. This Feast is indeed a Feat."
—Moira Egan