The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters

(Paperback, New edition)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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 Indias 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 others 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.

Author Bio

Rahat Kurd is a writer and poet based in Vancouver. Her most recent publication, The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters (Talonbooks 2021), is a hybrid of correspondence and poetry exchanged between Vancouver and Kashmir over a five year period with poet Sumayya Syed. Rahat Kurds first collection of poems, Cosmophilia, was published by Talonbooks in 2015. Kurd draws on multilingual poetics and is especially interested in the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature. With writer and poet Meredith Quartermain, Kurd co-curated and co-hosted The Rhizomatic, a monthly online poetry series featuring a single guest in a deep-dive format, from September 2020 until June 2021. She was the guest editor of the 2019 Summer Supplement issue of The Puritan online literary magazine, publishing poetry and fiction around the theme, What does it mean to be a Muslim writer Commissioned by composer Brian Current , Kurds libretto Light Upon Light was performed as part of an oratorio, The River of Light, at the Vancouver Opera Festival in May 2019.