Rooms Are Never Finished
The Country Without a Post Office
The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems
A Nostalgist’s Map of America
A Walk Through the Yellow Pages
The Half-Inch Himalayas
In Memory of Begum Akhtar & Other Poems
Bone-Sculpture
TRANSLATION
The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems
(Faiz Ahmed Faiz)
OTHER
Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English
(Editor)
T. S. Eliot as Editor
About the Author
Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri-American, was born on February 4, 1949, in New Delhi and grew up in Kashmir. He was educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and the University of Delhi. Shahid came to America in his early twenties and earned his Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and his M.F.A in Poetry at the University of Arizona in 1985. He taught at Hamilton College in New York, then became director of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He also taught at the University of Utah and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. In the spring of 2000, Shahid was a visiting poet in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at N.Y.U. Agha Shahid Ali’s volumes of poetry include Bone-Sculpture (1972), In Memory of Begum Akhtar & Other Poems (1979), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), and Rooms Are Never Finished (2001). Shahid also translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s collection The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems and was the editor of Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. He was awarded Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill fellowships and a Pushcart Prize, and his collection Rooms Are Never Finished was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.
Copyright © 2003 by Agha Shahid Ali Literary Trust
All rights reserved.
First Edition
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this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company Inc.,
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Book design by Chris Welch
Production manager: Andrew Marasia
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Agha, Shahid Ali, date.
Call me Ishmael tonight: a book of ghazals / Agha Shahid Ali. — 1 st ed.
p. c m.
ISBN 0-393-05195-1
1 Ghazals, American. I. Title.
PR9499.3.A39 C35 2003
821’.914 — dc21
2002015950
ISBN 978-0-393-32612-3
ISBN 978-0-393-35204-7 (e-book)
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Call Me Ishmael Tonight Page 4
