Gozāreh-hā-ye mo‘tareż Persian 2025

Protesting Propositions is a poetry collection by Somayeh Jalali in which language is not merely a vehicle for emotion but the very subject of the poem itself. In this work, the poet perceives the world through interwoven layers of words and, rather than narrating, surrenders to multiplicity of meaning and the vertigo of perception. These poems, charged with the passion and pain arising from contemporary female and social experience, oscillate between form and outcry. Their language is at times violent, at times tender, and always poised on the edge of eruption.

In Protesting Propositions, classical poetic structures collapse, and meaning drifts within the turbulence of associations, as if each word were revealing an alternative possibility of existence. Although rooted in lived experience, these poems erase the authorial presence within that experience, allowing the text itself to speak. Jalali’s poetry emerges from a process of inner revelation in the darkness of both mind and world, employing a language that resists fixed interpretation and instead searches for silenced inner voices.

Protesting Propositions is not merely the title of the book, but a manifesto. A praise of disorder, and a defense of the word’s right to disobedience.