Ganjavi has published two short story collections, one novel, and five poetry collections. The Galaxy Has No Memory of Sunset is Ganjavi’s fifth poetry collection. He also published The Strangers Who Live in Me with Asemana Books, as well as three earlier collections: And You Place Etcetera in the Middle of My Life (Jamedaran Publishing, 2009), Words that Fill the Etcetera (Arooz Electronic Publishing, 2009), and And the Trivial Feelings (Roozbehani Electronic Publishing, 2011). He has previously served as the editor of poetry section in Hafteh Art and Culture (2023-2024), and now is the editor of Asemana Magazine, which features multilingual, and radical voices. Asemana Magazine amplifies underrepresented and diasporic writers engaging with resistance, memory, decolonial thought, and literary experimentation.
Ganjavi’s poetry deeply reflective, historically grounded, and emotionally resonant. It often blends personal memory with political consciousness, drawing on themes such as exile, revolution, intergenerational trauma, resistance, and the passage of time. His poetic voice carries the weight of lived experience, particularly shaped by his engagement with Iranian leftist histories, diasporic longing, and archival silences.
Ganjavi’s work tends to merge lyrical intensity with documentary poetics—where verse becomes a space to grapple with historical documents, forgotten figures, and the violence of erasure. His lines are often sparse, deliberate, and attentive to the politics of language, place, and memory.
A few hallmarks of his poetry:
* Intertextual layering: Allusions to Persian classical literature, modernist Western poetry, and political manifestos often coexist.
* Elegiac tone: A sense of mourning—for people, ideologies, and places—runs through his writing.
* Visual and archival texture: His poems sometimes read like curated exhibits, evoking images, or marginalia.
* Bilingual and code-switching play: He occasionally moves between Persian and other Iranian languages, destabilizing linguistic boundaries and evoking hybrid identity.
To read one of his poems in translation, see:
https://asemanabooks.substack.com/p/a-poem-by-mahdi-ganjavi-translated
Galaxy Has No Memory of the Sunset; Poems by Mahdi Ganjavi
This book covers Ganjavi’s poetic experiences over a period of ten years, between 2011 and 2021. The narrative begins with the sudden death of Nima Rozbahani, a subversive underground singer. The poems unfold against the backdrop of the poet’s time, marked by the tremors and confusion of the senses caused by immigrating to Canada and encounters with the Iranian diaspora, as well as the suppression of social and political movements. These external forces either disrupted or propelled his dreams toward him.
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Read Mahmoud Khoshchehre review of the book here.
Strangers who live inside me, Poems by Mahdi Ganjavi
“Strangers who live inside me” (غریبههایی که در من زندگی میکنند) is Mahdi Ganjavi’s fourth collection of poetry. Composed of 75 serialized piece of poems, this collection is Ganjavi’s literary experiment about the emotional blindness and conceptual and relational ambiguities around body, language, gender, and desire.
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Read Saqi Qahreman’s review of the book here.
A collaboration between an ethnographer, a bilingual poet, and an Anglo-Irish literature scholar, this multilingual volume includes 100 Likoos, a syllabic genre of oral poetry, in their original Roudbari, accompanied by English and Persian translations.
Likoo is one of the oldest and most concise forms of oral poetry in the Iranian plateau. Composed in the languages of the people of Roudbar and Balochistan in southeast Iran, Likoos are a testament to the cultural diversity and linguistic richness of the region. Balochistan and Roudbar, akin to siblings in geographical proximity, share a profound cultural bond.
Likoos echo the lives of people in Roudbar, the lives of those living in the oasis, surrounded by the desert. They depict life in the desert with all its hardships, challenges, and failures. Likoos are the poetry of short joys and continuous hardship, reflecting the brutality of life dominated by nomadic social relations. They are the voice of a lover who catches a glimpse of his beloved in the desert, the call of a camel driver in the lonely nights of the desert on a dry path, or the mourning over the death of a young person due to tribal violence.
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