The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems of Agha Shahid Ali
Ali’s premature death in 2001 was a devastating loss to a number of communities (literary, immigrant, gay). Among many of his accomplishments was his one-person campaign to introduce the practice of writing the ghazal in English. It has since been a mainstay exercise in the creative writing classroom. But without question it’s his poetry that’s his greatest legacy—beautiful, haunting and exquisitely crafted. The publication of this collected volume in February by W. W. Norton will no doubt be a cause for widespread celebration and exhilaration.—Rigoberto Gonzalez