Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved

Winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize

About the Author

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Meridian, The Margins, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net finalist and a Pushcart nominee, Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of an Emerging Poets Fellowship from Poets House.

Advanced Praise

“Talukder’s poetry immediately transported me to an elsewhere both otherworldly and viscerally recognizable… one cannot enter this collection unchanged.” — Siham Karami, writing in Poetry International Poetry International

“I stayed in a perpetual state of goosebumps while reading Adeeba Talukder’s debut collection, Shahr-e-jaanaan, no lie. Maybe because the settings evoked are familiar and tangible but also magical, otherworldly. Maybe it’s that I fell, despite myself, 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

“When I have questions about… how to write poems that ask after the divine, I find myself returning to Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved by Adeeba Shahid Talukder.” —Rajiv Mohabir, ‘Ten Essential Voices,’ Orion Magazine Orion Magazine

“The only way for any literature to grow is to be in conversation with other traditions, other voices. Where would the intricate and deeply moving tradition of English sonnets be without Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard’s bringing it from Italy in the 16th century? Or, more recently, where would we be without Agha Shahid Ali’s passionate pursuit of ghazal in English, expanding American tradition in ways that no one could have predicted. Adeeba Shahid Talukder enters this conversation between traditions with elegance and insight. Herein we discover Urdu poetics of giants as different as Mirza Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, gently brought into English by Talukder’s own hand. Opening this book in the middle— starting with short lyrics such as ‘The Scaffold’s Branch’ and ‘Exotica’— I was immediately taken with their elegance of striking yet tender tonal shifts. Then, I dove into the the longer poem, ‘On Beauty,’ marveling at its integrities of the unsaid, its singing, its questions. This is one of those books that truly teaches us how to read it. After everything we thought we knew about the moon, herein is a chance to see it with new eyes. 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 of 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 dauting, sensual and sacred, enchanting and redeemable. This is a beautiful, stunning and unforgettable book.” — Khaled Mattawa, author of Mare Nostrum

“Beauty and urgency, lyricism and violence are carefully orchestrated into conversation. The beauty of these poems arises from their complexity, the infinite ways they bring together lyricism and urgency, femininity and violence, adornment and danger. ‘In this intricacy is power.’ This is a first book you will not soon forget.” — Kristina Marie Darling, author of Dark Horse: Poems & Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-946482-29-7