Beginning with the impassioned, never-before-published title poem, here is the life's work of a beloved Kashmiri-American poet. Agha Shahid Ali died in 2001, mourned by myriad lovers of poetry and devoted students. This volume, his shining legacy, moves from playful early poems to themes of mourning and loss, culminating in the ghazals of Call Me Ishmael Tonight. The title poem appears in print for the first time. from "The Veiled Suite" I wait for him to look straight into my eyes This is our only chance for magnificence. If he, carefully, upon this hour of ice, will let us almost completely crystallize, tell me, who but I could chill his dreaming night. Where he turns, what will not appear but my eyes? Wherever he looks, the sky is only eyes. Whatever news he has, it is of the sea.

A meditation on love and loss, The Veil Suite is a collaboration between Israeli-born painter, Izhar Patkin, and Kashmir's most revered poet, the late Agha Shahid Ali. Shahid's poem, which uses Dante's form of the canzone, was written specifically for this collaboration, and is his last work.

New essays, both personal and critical, on the work of beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali

"Ali's ghazals are contemporary and colloquial, deceptively simple, yet still grounded in tradition....Highly recommended."—Library Journal The beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali presents his own American ghazals. Calling on a line or phrase from fellow poets, Ali salutes those known and loved—W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, James Tate, and more—while in other searingly honest verse he courageously faces his own mortality.

Beginning with the impassioned, never-before-published title poem, here is the poet. Agha Shahid Ali died in 2001, mourned by myriad lovers of poetry and devoted students. This volume, his shining legacy, moves from playful early poems to themes of mourning and loss, culminating in the ghazals of Call Me Ishmael Tonight. The title poem appears in print for the first time. from “The Veiled Suite” I wait for him to look straight into my eyesThis is our only chance for magnificence.If he, carefully, upon this hour of ice,will let us almost completely crystallize,tell me, who but I could chill his dreaming night.Where he turns, what will not appear but my eyes?Wherever he looks, the sky is only eyes.Whatever news he has, it is of the sea.

"An incomparable work, an unmatched achievement."—Anthony Hecht In this stunningly inventive collection—a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in poetry—Ali excavates the devastation wrought upon his childhood home, Kashmir, and reveals a more personal devastation: his mother's death and the journey with her body back to Kashmir.

Concerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, Veil and Burn illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, become it, and in the transformation, to understand the suffering body. In poems about animals, artifacts, and monsters, Lambeth displays a fascination for all bodies while exploring their pain, common fate, alienation, and abilities. Hovering between poem and prose fragment, between the self and fellow creatures, Laurie Clements Lambeth celebrates physical sensation, imbuing it with lyric shape, however broken, however imprisoned the shape may be.