According to Haven, "Yet powerful affinities link The Shahnameh with the poems of this 21st century poet. The Persian Book of Kings echoes with a 'recurrent cry for justice against cruel or incompetent kings,' Dick writes in the introduction. Prison poems begin during the same era in Persia as well – Mas'ud Sa'd (1046–1121) starts the sad tradition, and it continues to this day. Political anger bubbles below the surface in Persian poetry throughout the last millennium. And so it does with Fatemeh Shams. 'It is an association that may at first sight seem counter-intuitive – the privacy of erotic passion allied with the public stance of political protest,' the translator writes, 'but the link is of course that both the passion and the politics are subversive of the status quo – of patriarchy that would deny women erotic autonomy, and of political authority that would deny them social freedom.'"
