Shape of Extinction brings together 59 short poems by the modernist Iranian poet Bijan Jalali, the first book-length selection of his meditative yet quietly radical approach to poetry. A critical introduction situates Jalali’s work within the broader currents of modern Persian poetry and politics. With bilingual Persian-English texts presented in parallel, this volume invites readers—both familiar and new—to engage with Jalali’s poetic vision. To purchase a copy, see here.
Endorsements
Jalali’s poetry unfolds in a space of numb survival, where language no longer marks the struggle between being and non-being but merely records the trace of an already-erased self. His verses resist the excess of meaning, embodying ‘the silence of poetry’ itself. In these translations, Aria Fani and Adeeba Shahid Talukder navigate the ‘disarming simplicity’ of Jalali’s work, rendering it with ‘literal closeness’ and ‘poetic independence.’ The result is an act of ‘transparent opacity,’ a translation that is both ‘a political event and an agent of transformation.’ Here, poetry begins ‘where all things end.’
— Domenico Ingenito, Associate Professor of Iranian Studies and premodern Persian Literature, UCLA
Bijan Jalali’s poems, like “vines growing between the past and the future,” pulsate with the life-giving energy of a poet whose lyric instinct is a force of nature that pits the poem against the page; by doing so, he shows us how the poem wins as it transcends artifice and fully comes to own itself as a phenomenon of what Aria Fani calls “metapoetry” in his superb introduction. Where Fani’s insights contextualize the unique place Jalali has in the “overlapping and plural modernisms” of Persian poetry— one of the world’s richest poetic traditions— Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s fine touch as a co-translator pierces the exosphere of craft, reaching the sphere of the elusive beloved, a space she knows well as a poet who draws from the Urdu tradition. The translated poems in Shape of Extinction settle as dew, refracting the mighty, delicate tendrils between the past and the yet to come, in Jalali’s Persian, a rare gift.
—Shadab Zeest Hashmi, poet and author of Ghazal Cosmopolitan