Das Gift

Zain Baweja lives in Karachi, Pakistan. Their poems have appeared in The *Oxford Review of Books *and AGNI, and are forthcoming in The Aleph Review. Their writing practice is influenced by eighteenth-century Urdu poetics, which includes literary devices such as iham, kaifiyat, khiyal bandi, ma’ni afrini, and mazmun afrini. Many of these theories, and ways of being, have been deliberately erased from the history of Indian poetry by Western colonialism and imperialism. (updated 4/2021)