Idra Novey Libri

Finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation A vivid, "mesmerizing" (New York Times Magazine) portrait of life in the shadow of violence and loss, for readers of both English and Persian The first selection of poems by renowned Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this collection is a captivating, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise. 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. Though the speakers in these poems are witnesses to the deforming effects of grief and memory, they remain alive to curiosity, to the pleasure of companionship, and to other ways of being and seeing. Lean Against This Late Hour illuminates the images we conjure in the face of abandonment and ruin, and finds them by turns frightening, bewildering, ethereal, and defiant. "This time," a disembodied voice commands, "send us a prophet who only listens."

Exploring the quest for a meaningful existence, this collection of poems delves into the contrasts between rural and urban life amid the challenges of a rapidly warming planet. The verses reflect on personal and collective struggles, capturing the essence of human experience in the face of environmental change. Through vivid imagery and thought-provoking themes, the poems invite readers to contemplate their place in the world and the impact of their choices.

Exploring the theme of confinement in the twenty-first century, Idra Novey's second collection delves into the realities of jails, courthouses, and caves. Through her vivid imagery, she reflects on the expanding prison complex and its impact on civilians who navigate this system daily. The collection invites readers to consider the deeper implications of confinement and the lives intertwined with it.

'Novey fully renders the inarticulable parts of artmaking - the antagonism of an artist's material, the pleasure in that difficulty, the way it troubles tidy ideas of legacy.' - Raven Leilani

When Brazilian novelist Beatriz Yagoda suddenly disappears, her American translator Emma travels to Brazil to solve the mystery while fending off rapacious loan sharks and the washed-up editor who made Yagoda famous

"On an unnamed island country ten years after the collapse of a brutal regime, Lena suspects the powerful senator she was involved with back in her student activist days may be guilty of murder. She says nothing, assuming no one will believe her, given her family's shameful support of the former regime and her lack of evidence. They are the same reasons she told no one, a decade earlier, what happened with the senator while they were dating"--