LEAN AGAINST THIS LATE HOUR

From one of the most prominent literary figures in contemporary Iran, this is a vivid, intimate collection that charts the difficulty of living with unspeakable violence and loss.

The first collection of poems by Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this is a mesmerizing, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In cinematic, fabulist writing that pans wide as deftly as it narrows into intimate focus, time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, the dead wait for sunrise.

LEAN AGAINST THIS LATE HOUR speaks to the profound loneliness of abandonment, and the frightening, bewildering, and strangely beautiful images the human mind conjures in the presence of absence: characters witness tanks crossing the trenches into their bedsheets and find their dead manifesting in the dust circulating a room, aching to be kissed. In the space left between the personal and the political, these ghosts march through a wall-less border. Abdolmalekian resists definitive separations between cause and effect, life and death, or heaven and hell, and challenges our sense of what is fixed and what is unsettled and permeable. "This time," a disembodied voice states, "send us a prophet who only listens."

Garous Abdolmalekian was born in 1980, days after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War and lives in Tehran. He is the author of five poetry books and the recipient of the Karnameh Poetry Book of the Year Award and the Iranian Youth Poetry Book Prize. His poems have been translated into Arabic, French, German, Kurdish, and Spanish. Abdolmalekian is presently the editor of the poetry section at Chesmeh publications in Tehran and the executive editor of publications at the Youth Poetry Office in Iran.

Ahmad Nadalizadeh is a translator for the Persian and PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Oregon.
Idra Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. She is the award-winning author of the novels Those Who Knew and Ways to Disappear. Her work has been translated into ten languages and she's translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. For her poetry and translation she has received awards from the PEN Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation.