Paisley: Poems

By Rakhshan Rizwan, Rachel Piercey, Leila Aboulela and Moniza Alvi

Rakhshan Rizwan's debut collection simmers with a poised, driving anger. Drawing on the rich visual and material culture of her home region, Rizwan unpacks and offers critical comment on the vexed issues of class, linguistic and cultural identity – particularly for women – in the context of Pakistan and South Asia. She writes about the hypocrisy of the men who claim to worship women, the nuances of using Urdu or Hindi, and the many contradictions of the city of her birth, Lahore. As well as startling free verse, Rizwan's many accomplished ghazals both explore and demonstrate her fascination with multilingualism, code-switching, displacement and belonging. The poems in Paisley are an unflinchingly feminist assault on received ideas about womanhood which present the reader with often-uncomfortable truths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Release date: Sep 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781910139776

Rakhshan Rizwan

Rakhshan Rizwan works as an Acquisitions Editor. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Utrecht University. Her poetry pamphlet, Paisley (The Emma Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award and the Michael Marks Poetry Prize. Her collection of children’s poetry, My Sneezes are Perfect (The Emma Press, 2021) documents the difficulties of moving countries, and living through a pandemic from the perspective of a young child. Her book Kashmiri Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure, and the Local Cosmopolitan (Routledge, 2020) looks at how Kashmiri authors use innovative languages of happiness to do human rights advocacy. Her writing has appeared in Aaduna, Nimrod, Postcolonial Text and Blue Lyra Review, among others. She is on the editorial team of the children’s poetry journal Tyger Tyger Magazine. She is from Lahore, Pakistan, has lived in Germany and the Netherlands, and currently lives in the Bay Area of North California, US.

Book preview

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PAISLEY

OTHER TITLES FROM THE EMMA PRESS

POETRY PAMPHLETS

Dragonish, by Emma Simon

Pisanki, by Zosia Kuczyńska

Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real, by Padraig Regan

SHORT STORY PAMPHLETS

First fox, by Leanne Radojkovich

Postcard Stories, by Jan Carson

The Secret Box, by Daina Tabūna

POETRY ANTHOLOGIES

Urban Myths and Legends: Poems about Transformations

The Emma Press Anthology of the Sea

This Is Not Your Final Form: Poems about Birmingham

The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts

THE EMMA PRESS PICKS

DISSOLVE to: L.A., by James Trevelyan

Meat Songs, by Jack Nicholls

Bezdelki, by Carol Rumens

Birmingham Jazz Incarnation, by Simon Turner

POETRY BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

Watcher of the Skies: Poems about Space and Aliens

Moon Juice, by Kate Wakeling

The Noisy Classroom, by Ieva Flamingo

POETRY AND ART SQUARES

AWOL, by John Fuller and Andrew Wynn Owen,

illustrated by Emma Wright

Now You Can Look, by Julia Bird, illustrated by Anna Vaivare

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For Samee, Farzana and Rizwan

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THE EMMA PRESS

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by the Emma Press Ltd

Poems copyright © Rakhshan Rizwan 2017

Introduction copyright © Leila Aboulela 2017

All rights reserved.

The right of Rakhshan Rizwan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act