Overview

The Book of Z reconsiders mystical possibilities above all, longing for divine union found by poets within scriptural language. For a thousand years the story of Zulaykha ""the wife of Aziz"" in the Qur'an and her passion for Yusuf has been celebrated in classical and contemporary Persian and Urdu poetry, in Muslim folk traditions, and in Persian and Mughal miniature painting. At the same time, as the Biblical ""wife of Potiphar"" she has been just as indelibly cast as temptress in misogynistic cautionary tales and canonical Western art. Rahat Kurd writes in the vividly imagined voice of a Zulaykha who considers her Abrahamic lineage from its estranged and fragmented reality, asking what consolation human desire and divine longing might offer our shared present tense.

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9781772016895

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Reviews

""Compelling ... furthering a lineage of literary works that seek to provide a perspective that counterpoints and contradicts the male gaze … Kurd articulates a lineage of Persian language and culture, one that moves across centuries of lyric thought … allowing her Zulaykha her own thoughts, her own history, wants, and desires."" —rob mclennan, periodicities

Author Information

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).

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