Lean Against This Late Hour

1

Kaveh Akbar

It is staggering to encounter something that feels so truly new as Garous Abdolmalekian's Lean Against This Late Hour. Turning its pages for the first time, I felt myself literally gasping out loud, running to read my spouse this line or that poem. In these crisp translations of Abdolmalekian's lively lyrics, there is an irreducible complexity of thinking—about growth, time, desire, trauma—rendered as vectors with precision and disarming clarity.

2

Ilya Kaminsky

This book announces to the English-speaking world that there are, indeed, still great poets in our day and age. There is still the possibility for the lyric voice to assume something larger, to give shape and form to myths and dreams that speak out of devastation. Abdolmalekian is a poet who never gives in to despair: out of history's devastation comes a new and beautiful song. Put simply, Garous Abdolmalekian is one of the most talented poets on the world scene today.

3

Solmaz Sharif

Lean Against This Late Hour is a book of aftermath, where speech is pared down to its most basic music. In these haunted and haunting poems, Abdolmalekian refuses the deceptive satisfaction of the observable and makes, instead, in quietly surreal gestures, the known unknowable again. How lucky we are to see in the starkest of lines the pain and trauma of, yes, warfare, but also of life itself. This is a tremendous introduction to his work.

4

Monica Youngna Youn

Reading Abdolmalekian’s poems is like happening upon a system of non-Euclidian geometry: shapes so clearly rendered, so seemingly inevitable, that you’re stunned you had never encountered them before. But then you realize that these elegantly simple lines, in fact, interpenetrate multiple dimensions. The natural and the political, phenomenology and sexuality, reason and imagination fuse into new and compelling hybrids. Only in language can these concepts occupy the same space, and I’m profoundly grateful that English-language readers have, at long last, been offered access to this work.

5

Cathy Park Hong

Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour delves deep into the solitary melancholy heart of a poet gripped by the buried secrets of Iran’s historical trauma. With aching intimacy, Abdolmalekian takes dreamlike inventory of the deaths that hang over him. He writes with orphic clarity the silence that the state has imposed upon him, and takes a shred of darkness that enshrouds his country and whets it to a blade that sings. This is a powerful, searching, and timeless collection of poems.