Description
The Chair by the Window takes its title from the position it is written from: a chair set beside a window, present to what lies outside but conducting its inquiry from inside the room. From that seat, this fourth collection asks what our oldest words actually hold.
It opens in refusal – a turning away from the frame that would supply ready answers – and settles into the quiet interior that refusal returns to. In the seminar poems at its center, a professor writes a single word on the board – War, Poverty, Success, Hope, Eternity – and the room produces what the word truly contains for the people gathered in it. The parables that follow move to a smaller table, where a question is asked and the answer arrives not in speech but through a body, a gesture, a hand that does not reach for what is offered. The collection closes at a dark window, where a man rises from the chair and walks toward what no prior framework can explain.
Written first in Persian and carried into English, these poems stand in the tradition of witness – compression over elaboration, image over statement, trust in the reader and in silence. Companion essays set each poem in conversation with poets, philosophers, theologians, and scientists across the Persian and Western inheritances. What the chair gives – by the light from the window, by the room around it, by what it holds when empty – is the substance of this book’s report.
The reader is not told a verdict. The reader is offered a place to sit.
