Hosseinkhani’s A Bird on the Waiting Branch is a book of thresholds, between lovers and distances, tenderness and terror, the private ache of longing and the public wound of war. With Tahere Forsat Safaei and Kurt Lovelace’s clear-eyed translation, these poems move with a grave music, their melancholy sharpened into images you won’t easily shake: a dried river under a bridge, a child with a snapped balloon string, an angel whose wings are glass. Threaded through this longing is a stark meditation on mortality.