Shape of Extinction

Published by Asemana Books

SHAPE OF EXTINCTION

Poems by

Bijan Jalali

Translated from the Persian by

Adeeba Shahid Talukder and Aria Fani

Preface by Domenico Ingenito

Critical introduction by Aria Fani

Cover illustration & artwork by Amelia Ossorio

ISBN: 978-1-0690210-8-3

Winner of the 2025 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize for modern poetry.

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.

Bijan Jalali (1927–1999) was an Iranian poet known for his brief, minimalist, meditative style. Departing from traditional Persian verse, his poems focus on the nature of poetic production, the cosmos, and nature. Though overlooked during his lifetime, Jalali’s work has gained posthumous recognition for its quiet yet profound impact on modern Persian poetry.

To purchase a paper copy via Amazon, click here.

To purchase a paper copy via Lulu, click here.

To purchase a kindle version, click here.

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani and Bengali-American poet, vocalist, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), winner of the 2017 Kundiman Poetry Prize, and the chapbook What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Washington Square Review, Gulf Coast, World Literature Today, Aleph Review, The Margins, Words Without Borders, and various other publications. Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and has received fellowships from Kundiman and Poets House. She is currently training in Hindustani classical music under Ustad Salamat Ali and is the recipient of a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Aria Fani is an assistant professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Washington, where he co-convenes the Translation Studies Hub. His first book, Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism (University of Texas Press, 2024), was translated into Persian by Shirazeh Press in Iran. Outside of academia, he advocates for non-citizen Americans, focusing on asylum seekers from Central America.

Domenico Ingenito, Associate Professor of Iranian Studies at UCLA, specializes in premodern Persian literature, visual culture, and gender studies. His interdisciplinary research integrates philology, literary theory, and manuscript studies, focusing on Persian lyricism. His notable works include Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry (Brill, 2020) and the critical edition and Italian translation of Forugh Farrokhzad’s collected poems, Io parlo dai confini della notte: tutte le poesie (Bompiani, 2023).

Amelia Ossorio is an illustrator from Seattle who creates vibrant and playful designs that invite curiosity and nostalgia. She studies Persian at the University of Washington’s Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures department and is one of Aria Fani’s students. Her work draws inspiration from a wide range of contemporary artists that emphasize self-reflection and freedom, including Forugh Farrokhzad and Frida Kahlo. She often incorporates symbols from nature, colorful scenes from life, and memories into her illustrations. Ossorio’s art can be found online under the name @sensitive.cactus.

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

The work of Bijan Jalali, one of the most inventive and celebrated modern Persian poets, is rooted in a particularly keen sense of yearning, one that asks the reader to “hear my cries, / fathom these words / bursting with / my silence.” In their beautifully rendered and meticulously researched Persian-to-English translations in Shape of Extinction, Adeeba Shahid Talukdar and Aria Fani give Jalali’s poetry a much-deserved wider readership and help transform this silence into a fire that “sets the world / ablaze but / makes it luminous.” Early on in this book, Jalali pines, “if only poetry / were a sharp blade // i would plunge it into my chest / with my own hands,” and, as we move through these short but richly evocative poems, we quickly come to feel our hearts being cut open with desire and melancholy. As Talukdar and Fani show, Jalali’s poems are a testament to the power of writing: “when reality / is so unspeakable // one must resort to silence / or to verse”; Jalali explains, “i bestow / my sorrow / upon the blank page / for safekeeping.” And to read these safekept sorrows is to honor the spellbinding gift of his poems.

—Faisal Mohyuddin, poet and author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children and The Riddle of Longing