Whether playful or pensive, allusive or elegiac, Not Elegy, But Eros honors the dead even while it affirms and celebrates life. This debut collection from Nausheen Eusuf covers a range of styles and themes—elegies, love poems, ars poetica, poems of witness, poems of wit and wordplay, poems set in Bangladesh, and poems set in the US. Informed by a keen awareness of both the human world and the world of language, the poems resonate with the music of the ordinary and the elusive. |
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Nausheen Eusuf blends wit, passion, and grief with masterful dexterity, controlling emotion as she stirs up the unbearable. Her poems are as hospitable to private sorrow as to public mourning over the violences suffered in her native Bangladesh. Yet her sense of the absurd keeps the book aloft, soaring on the helium of her wordplay. She has made this mixture of privacy and giddiness her own.
—Rosanna Warren
Nausheen Eusuf’s poetry reflects a unified sensibility that can deal with a wide range of themes, personal and public. There is hard thought and emotional intensity combined with precision of diction and admirable formal control, making this a brilliant debut collection.
—Kaiser Haq
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