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. “You didn’t know that you were an immigrant,” Dil tells herself in revelation after revelation, her parents’ divorce sweeping her back to Nazimuddin Road, then Lahore, Queen Mary’s College, parathas and pomegranate chutney sweetening 117 degree days. In the way of Whitman, Dil discovers that she “contain[s] multitudes” as America beckons again—Bloomington, Columbia, Poughkeepsie, Boston, an ever-revolving door of places, experiences, and selves made new. I am reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s words in The Poetics of Space: “Immensity is within ourselves.” Dil’s journey is at once powerful and circular, transformative and tender. 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 her third collection of poems since 2016, Dil weaves a dialogic narrative with herself that reaches across the distances of time and place to create a tapestry of pleasurable and painful memories. As Shaheen recalls and addresses Choiti in each of these testamentary poems, we can feel the uncanny power of the lyrical word to retrieve and reconstitute formative moments from the speaker's living past in the imagination. And gradually but assuredly, as we follow the chronology of this collection, we find ourselves asking: who is I here and who is you. Ultimately, Dil’s collection of recollection returns otherwise private moments from her past to a future in poeisis, where much like the universal experience of the “uncanny,” the poet brings to light what by its nature is mysterious and secret.

The Bulgarian poet Lyubomir Nikolov is the author of numerous books, translated into seven languages. He received the National Southern Spring Award in 1982 and the Third Annual Settlement House American Poetry Prize in 2016. His latest book is The Wine’s Angel (Fakel Press 2018).

Shaheen Dil is a reformed academic, banker and consultant who now devotes herself to poetry. She was born in Bangladesh, and lives in Pittsburgh. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies. Her poem “River at Night” was a winning poem in the Passager 2021 Poetry Contest. Her poem “The Red Thread” was nominated for a pushcart prize. Dil has published two books of poetry, Acts of Deference (Fakel 2016) and The Boat-maker’s Art (Kelsay Books 2024.) Dil is a member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange, the DVP/US1 Poets, and the Porch Poets. She holds a BA from Vassar College, a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Additional information is available on her website: shaheendil.com

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Letters to My Younger Self

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