BRING NOW THE ANGELS
(University of Pittsburgh Press)
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“…Ahmed’s luminous second book of poems, Bring Now the Angels, considers layered relationships & identities: adults to parents & children; bystanders as public witnesses; humans to angels, to water, or bureaucracy — or, as in ‘Zodiac,’ to the self.”
–Naomi Shihab Nye, New York Times Magazine
“There are books of poetry whose service approaches public ritual of private feeling. Dilruba Ahmed’s Bring Now the Angels is one of those books. It is a prayer to see more clearly one’s grief & one’s relationship to the vibrancy & complexity of parents & children & the natural world. This is a book that asks about neglect & regret in order to understand how we might care for the living & the dead. What a healing collection of poems Ahmed has given us.”
–Patrick Rosal, author of Brooklyn Antediluvian
"Ahmed has two of the greatest gifts of any poet—empathy & music, which is to say: song & heart."
–Kazim Ali, author of Inquisition
"Ahmed's poems...unite body & spirit in a mood of profound & perpetual questioning."
–Reginald Gibbons, author of Last Lake
“…Ahmed sings a complex song of loss: loss of a father, loss of a culture, and loss of country, both the original country & the one in which one is raised. In tightly-wound lyrics, Ahmed questions what it is to live in this present moment where loss seems to build almost hourly. With stringent rhetoric & beautiful imagery, Ahmed shows us what it means to be ‘[c]aught between one world / and the next..’”
–C. Dale Young, author of The Halo
Dhaka Dust
(Graywolf Press)
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“What’s so promising about Dhaka Dust is precisely that Ahmed never evades our contemporary moment, taking on a globalizing, anxiety-stricken world while always focusing on the contradictory ways that her speakers live through them. Over the course of these poems, Ahmed subtly crafts the emotionally complex terrain that captures the sprawl and dislocation that shape our early 21st century psychology.”
–Hyphen Magazine
“On the surface, Dilruba Ahmed’s poems are rich and variegated. They spin like compass needles crowded around by magnetic fields, and they’d probably seem as exotic to a citizen of Dhaka as they would to a citizen of Duluth. In their depths, though, they seem anything but exotic; they seem to be our own impossible, loving, intimate, bereaved thoughts restored to us transformed and ennobled.”
–Vijay Seshadri, author of The Long Meadow
"[Ahmed] understands that she’s dust . . . She’s dust whipped across continents to land in, of all places, Ohio; dark-skinned dust to be spurned, shunned or boot-heeled; immigrant Muslim dust that is feared but also fears. Ms. Ahmed knows too that words are dust, but in them she found her 21st-century self, saved herself.”
—The New York Times
“The language in Dilruba Ahmed’s admirable first collection scintillates. The notes it hits are delightfully unexpected. Weaving together innovative and traditional forms, Ahmed has chosen to illuminate experiences of Bangladesh and America that defy categorization, that illustrate the truth of being a woman in today’s world: global, hybrid, and ultimately alone.”
—Chitra Divakaruni, author of Before We Visit the Goddess
"Dhaka Dust transports you into a world heart-wrenchingly infused with gorgeous metaphor and grace. It’s impossible to turn down a request for '…the taste of another’s prayer/ cool as a coin / newly minted on the tongue.' Dilruba Ahmed is a stunning talent, a 'heart-thief' with 'jasmine strands tangled at [her] neck.' This collection will burn brightly in your imagination for years to come. World, get ready for the loveliest of poetry debuts.”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic
Reviews
BRING NOW THE ANGELS
DHAKA DUST
