Dilruba Ahmedʼs debut book of poems, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2010 Bakeless Prize for poetry. Ahmedʼs writing has appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and lives near Philadelphia. Photo credit: Mike Drzal.
Author website: http://www.dilrubaahmed.com
Dilruba Ahmed has written 8 article(s) for MQR.
by Dilruba Ahmed
The venue: The Raven Lounge in Philadelphia, not far from Rittenhouse Square. A scene for unlikely juxtapositions: downstairs, you’ll find board games, and upstairs, a stripper pole. Strobe lights in the bathrooms. This bar earns bonus points for offering nightly drink discounts for teachers (“Teacher Appreciation: Show your Valid ID and get 50% off drinks!”). And on this hot mid-June evening, approximately 70 people have crammed into the dark second floor of the Raven Lounge to celebrate the publication of English teacher and poet Iain Haley Pollock’s first book of poetry, Spit Back a Boy, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A local bookstore owner recently informed me that the average number of attendees at poetry readings in Philly—and perhaps across the country—falls between 3 and 10, so drawing this kind of crowd is a major feat. What follows is a series of photos from the book launch party.
Continue Readingby Dilruba Ahmed
I’ve been haunted for much of this month by a bird. Not a real bird, but an animal depicted in “The Documents of Spring,” a poem by Rick Barot that appears in the latest issue of The Asian American Literary Review, which is by far the fattest literary journal to have landed on my doorstep in the past year (RHINO is a close second). As we all know, subscriptions to literary journals are not cheap. But a former instructor’s advice and admonishment to an undergraduate writing workshop still lives with me: choosing to write means entering a community, which in turn means supporting that community by attending readings, buying books, and purchasing subscriptions. And so, when I can, I pick up another subscription… to Inch, because something in its tiny pages stings me every time; to New England Review, because it’s doomed to tank soon; and to AALR, one of several new Asian American literary magazines that are bound to attract a readership that extends well beyond the Asian American community. But first, back to the bird.
Continue Readingby Dilruba Ahmed
It’s the cruellest month: lilacs, dead land, spring rain…you know how it goes. For several reasons this April has seemed particularly dismal to me, not in small part due to an car accident that occurred earlier, in March. There’s nothing like a face-to-face encounter with Death to make clear how little control we have over our lives, how powerless we are when it comes to protecting those we love and even those who are strangers to us. In this case, thankfully, everyone involved was physically okay after the collision (and I am, of course, deeply grateful for that), but grappling with the idea that we are ultimately helpless in the face of greater, uncontrollable forces launched me, for a good part of the spring, into a deep funk.
Continue Readingby Dilruba Ahmed
Meet Iain Haley Pollock: Philadelphia-based poet, English teacher at Chestnut Hill Academy, and co-host with his partner Naomi of an occasional culinary smackdown based on “Iron Chef.” Iain’s first book of poems, Spit Back a Boy, won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and will be published in June 2011 by the University of Georgia Press. I conducted the following interview with Iain via e-mail, but you might imagine the ambient noise of Hobbes Coffeshop in Swarthmore, PA, where Iain and I have met from time to time to talk about poems: a whirring espresso machine and clattering mugs. Fork tines clinking into bowls of an elusive truffled macaroni that suddenly disappeared from the local menu. The tap-tap of Iain adding more ketchup* to his macaroni. And amid the clamor of the everyday, the sound of Iain reading aloud a remarkable poem called “Chorus of X, the Rescuers’ Mark,” a poem that I am thrilled to share here in an audio clip as part of this interview, along with Iain’s comments on the major preoccupations of his manuscript, poetic inspiration and form, and the recent controversy over Tony Hoagland’s poem, “The Change.”
Continue Readingby Dilruba Ahmed
In just a couple of weeks, thousands from the literary world will descend upon hotels, bookstores, and eateries in Washington, D.C. for the annual conference of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs. For the uninitiated, the notion of navigating a crowd of 8000 writers, selecting from 350 concurrent sessions over the course of several days, and possibly riding in the conference elevator with one of 500 publishers is, well, more than a little daunting. Whether they create pure pleasure, complete agony, or something in between for those who attend, professional conferences of this magnitude warrant a user guide to put new attendees at ease. To help guide the conference neophytes among us, I’ve invited three friends to shed light on the panels, the people, and the parties: Geeta Kothari, Fiction Editor at The Kenyon Review and Writing Center Director and Senior Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh; Justin Bigos, a poet and alumni of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers; and Neela Banerjee, co-editor of Indivisible, journalist, and activist.
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