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The Last Speaker: Selected Poems of Agha Shahid Ali | Modern Indian English Poetry Collection Featuring Ghazals, Sonnets & Free Verse
Agha Shahid Ali created poems that mesmerize and dazzle as they embrace his aesthetics and capture his landscapes of the heart.
The poems in The Last Speaker allow the reader to be immersed in history, memory, and nostalgia that Agha Shahid Ali wove into the tapestries he created as he evolved as a poet. Ranging from free verse to traditional poetic forms, his poetry encompasses canzones, sestinas, sonnets, sapphics, pantoums, villanelles, prose poems, and, of course, ghazals in English.
Since his death in 2001, scholarly articles and dissertations continue to delve into the craft of Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry. This selection offers a new lens that, while highlighting what are now his ‘classic’ poems, also brings to the forefront other poems that are even more haunting.
The poems in The Last Speaker allow the reader to be immersed in history, memory, and nostalgia that Agha Shahid Ali wove into the tapestries he created as he evolved as a poet. Ranging from free verse to traditional poetic forms, his poetry encompasses canzones, sestinas, sonnets, sapphics, pantoums, villanelles, prose poems, and, of course, ghazals in English.
Since his death in 2001, scholarly articles and dissertations continue to delve into the craft of Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry. This selection offers a new lens that, while highlighting what are now his ‘classic’ poems, also brings to the forefront other poems that are even more haunting.
177 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 23, 2026
About the author
Agha Shahid Ali
25 books217 followersAgha Shahid Ali (आगा शाहीद अली) was an American poet of Kashmiri ancestry and upbringing.
His poetry collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, Rooms Are Never Finished (finalist for the National Book Award, 2001). His last book was Call Me Ishmael Tonight, a collection of English ghazals. His poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies.
Ali was also a translator of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (The Rebel's Silhouette; Selected Poems) and editor (Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English). He was widely credited for helping to popularize the ghazal form in America.
Ali taught at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as creative writing programs at University of Utah, Warren Wilson College and New York University. He died peacefully, in his sleep, of brain cancer in December, 2001. He was laid to rest in Northampton, Massachusetts.
His poetry collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, Rooms Are Never Finished (finalist for the National Book Award, 2001). His last book was Call Me Ishmael Tonight, a collection of English ghazals. His poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies.
Ali was also a translator of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (The Rebel's Silhouette; Selected Poems) and editor (Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English). He was widely credited for helping to popularize the ghazal form in America.
Ali taught at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as creative writing programs at University of Utah, Warren Wilson College and New York University. He died peacefully, in his sleep, of brain cancer in December, 2001. He was laid to rest in Northampton, Massachusetts.
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