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A rigorously feminist and poetic record of thinking through trauma as it unfolds and a document of life under military lockdown, "a book like a cluster of thorns with some few fragrant petals caught in them."
About the author
Rahat Kurd, a writer and editor based in Vancouver, BC, draws on multilingual poetics and is especially interested in the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature.
Cosmophilia, her first poetry collection, was published in 2015 by Talonbooks, who in 2021 published
The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters, a hybrid correspondence/poetry exchange between Vancouver and Kashmir with poet Sumayya Syed. Kurd's most recent essay, "Elegiac Moods: Letters to Agha Shahid Ali," was published in
River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (trace press).
Summary
The City That Is Leaving Forever is a unique twenty-first-century time capsule: an instant-message exchange between Kashmir and British Columbia spanning more than five years in the lives of two Muslim Kashmiri women poets. In 2016, as India’s military carries out extrajudicial killings and imposes a lengthy curfew in Srinagar, Kurd is forced to cancel her family trip to Kashmir. Syed and Kurd confide in each other as the weeks and months pass, working through drafts of new poems, reading each other’s work, discussing multilingual poetics, the challenges of translation, and the contrasts of daily life in their two cities. The result is a rigorously feminist record of thinking through trauma as it unfolds and a document of life under military lockdown, “a book like a cluster of thorns with some few fragrant petals caught in them.”
