SHAHEEN DIL

Available in April

“Where do you end and I begin?” is the question which haunts Shaheen Dil’s remarkable memoir-in-poems. Addressed to Choiti, her younger self, Dil’s poems shepherd us from Old Dhaka—a childhood stitched from blue silk garara, mango trees, rikshaws, and the love of her Ammu and Abbu—to Chicago and then Ann Arbor, where “a new world thrust[s]” her into days of forgotten Bengali, the joy of Twinkies, and stone quarries.

I am reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s words in The Poetics of Space: “Immensity is within ourselves.” These wonderful poems leave me breathless, ecstatic, eager to seek out the selves which made me. They leave me yearning to ask the Choiti still lingering in all of us: “Where might I end and you begin again?”

Sara Henning is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018). She teaches at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.

In The Boat-Maker’s Art, Shaheen Dil displays the whole range of poetics and of her culturally-engaged imagination. Dreamy and full of sensibility, these poems turn with the lightest of touches to reveal the wit and allusion that underpins every description.

Dil is a poet who eschews the tired gestures of confessional verse to share with us a deeply-felt view of the human world itself. In her vision contemporary experience is still richly meaningful and connected through myth and religion with past and future human lives.
Fiona Sampson, MBE, FRSL, is one of the UK’s leading poets and writers. Her work has been translated into 37 languages. Her honors include: the European Lyric Atlas Prize, the Naim Frasheri International Laureateship, and the Wales Poetry Book of the Year.

Now available on Amazon

Time and again this impressive poetic venture asks Faustian questions about the meaning and coherence of life, only to acknowledge the deficiency of all predetermined responses to its perpetual crises, including the experience of loss. In a sense, the individual poems are variations of an existential longing for insight and cognition, which comes on a journey through poetry and strives to open onto new horizons of understanding.

Dr. Klaus D. Post, University of Augsburg, Germany, on Acts of Deference.

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