“I fell captive to the spells of its stories—Scheherezade and her command over wild nights of imagination come to mind. Maybe it's the way Talukder manages to both evoke Urdu poetic tradition and create her own—these poems swoon with the restrained sensuality of the old world while dancing with the glittering passions of the new. Let yourself get caught up in this book's wondrous whorls and whirls—you won't regret it." —Tarfia Faizullah, author of Registers of Illuminated Villages and Seam “After everything we thought we knew about ourselves, and our loss, there is more to find: 'When the color left / my cheeks,' the poet writes, 'You / left too.' This book is an exquisite lyrical feast.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa “Adeeba Talukder's City of the Beloved hovers on the nexus of heartache and joy, a meeting point of arrival and exodus, and where love is the revolving door to the world of the unknown. Recalling the concision and scintillating acumen of Emily Dickinson, Mirabai, Rabia and Sappho, and drawing on the masters of Urdu and Persian poetry, Talukder renders a full world of heart, soul, and body, profound and daunting, sensual and sacred, enchanting and redeemable. This is a beautiful, stunning and unforgettable book.” — Khaled Mattawa, author of Mare Nostrum Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of the chapbook What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018).

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. SHAHR-E-JAANAAN sets out to recreate the universe of Urdu and Persian poetic tradition, its tropes both lenses and mirrors for the speaker's reality. As she maps her romances onto legends, directing their characters perform her own tragedy, their fantastical metaphors easily lend themselves to her fluctuating mental state. Cycling between delirious grandeur and wretched despair, she is torn between two selves--the pitiable lover continually rejected, and the cruel, unattainable beloved comparable in her exaltation to a god. SHAHR-E-JAANAAN explores, interrogates, and distorts these dichotomies and their symbolism, calling into question the forces that elevate some to divinity even as they damn others to injustice and oppression.

The poems in this collection evoke the wonder and newness of a recent marriage, exploring the ways love both calms and troubles our deepest wounds. Weaving Urdu and English poetic traditions, Talukder recalls Agha Shahid Ali's intellectual grace, but there's an intimacy to these poems that is all her own. "You / will never know / if you are beautiful," Talukder cautions. Her poems balance on this knife's edge - at once deft and revelatory. Her voice is like nothing I've encountered before.- Emily Moore, author of ShuffleIn poems that weave the lyrical passions and strains of Urdu literary traditions with contemporary nerve and insight, What Is Not Beautiful by Adeeba Shahid Talukder presents a new and necessary voice. This collection invites the reader to follow meditations on family, self, womanhood, and culture rendered with the intimate urgency of the best lyric poetry. In the same way the speaker of one poem "[searches], again for beauty" only to find it "means something / else now," the readers of Talukder's poems will find the world around them cast in a new, vivid clarity.- José Angel Araguz, author of Until We Are Level AgainAdeeba Talukder is a poet who knows in her bones that everything changes, that the transience of our experience in this world is what calls us to record its beauty, and that this transience itself must be named beautiful. Returning again and again to the intimacy of the mirror's gaze, we are called to communion, to gaze with her into the dark that is ourselves. In doing so, we are given an immeasurable gift: with these poems in your grasp, you will never again be alone with your reflections. Both courageous and strikingly gentle, these poems are a potent tincture. Drink deep and you will be made strong.- Katie Willingham, author of Unlikely Designs

Annemarie Schimmel, one of the world's foremost authorities on Persian literature, provides a comprehensive introduction to the complicated and highly sophisticated system of rhetoric and imagery used by the poets of Iran, Ottoman Turkey, and Muslim India. She shows that these images have been used and refined over the centuries and reflect the changing conditions in the Muslim world. According to Schimmel, Persian poetry does not aim to be spontaneous in spirit or highly personal in form. Instead it is rooted in conventions and rules of prosody, rhymes, and verbal instrumentation. Ideally, every verse should be like a precious stone--perfectly formed and multifaceted--and convey the dynamic relationship between everyday reality and the transcendental. Persian poetry, Schimmel explains, is more similar to medieval European verse than Western poetry as it has been written since the Romantic period. The characteristic verse form is the ghazal--a set of rhyming couplets--which serves as a vehicle for shrouding in conventional tropes the poet's real intentions. Because Persian poetry is neither narrative nor dramatic in its overall form, its strength lies in an "architectonic" design; each precisely expressed image is carefully fitted into a pattern of linked figures of speech. Schimmel shows that at its heart Persian poetry transforms the world into a web of symbols embedded in Islamic culture.

A Library Journal Best Reference Book of 2022 This book represents the culmination of over 150 years of literary achievement by the most diverse ethnic group in the United States. Diverse because this group of ethnic Americans includes those whose ancestral roots branch out to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia. Even within each of these regions, there exist vast differences in languages, cultures, religions, political systems, and colonial histories. From the earliest publication in 1887 to the latest in 2021, this dictionary celebrates the incredibly rich body of fiction, poetry, memoirs, plays, and children’s literature. Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on genres, major terms, and authors. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this topic.

"This book provides the first ever overview of the history and development of Islam in Afghanistan. It covers every era from the conversion of Afghanistan through the medieval and early modern periods to the present day. Based on primary sources in Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Urdu and Uzbek, its depth and scope of coverage is unrivalled by any existing publication on Afghanistan. As well as state-sponsored religion, the chapters cover such issues as the rise of Sufism, Sharia, women's religiosity, transnational Islamism and the Taliban. Islam has been one of the most influential social and political forces in Afghan history. Providing idioms and organizations for both anti-state and anti-foreign mobilization, Islam has proven to be a vital socio-political resource in modern Afghanistan. Even as it has been deployed as the national cement of a multi-ethnic 'Emirate' and then 'Islamic Republic,' Islam has been no less a destabilizing force in dividing Afghan society. Yet despite the universal scholarly recognition of the centrality of Islam to Afghan history, its developmental trajectories have received relatively little sustained attention outside monographs and essays devoted to particular moments or movements. To help develop a more comprehensive, comparative and developmental picture of Afghanistan's Islam from the eighth century to the present, this edited volume brings together specialists on different periods, regions and languages. Each chapter forms a case study 'snapshot' of the Islamic beliefs, practices, institutions and authorities of a particular time and place in Afghanistan"--Provided by publishe