The Book of Z

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By (author): Rahat Kurd

In The Book of Z, Rahat Kurd turns to classical Persian and Urdu poets whose work responds passionately to mystical possibilities – above all, longing for divine union – found within scriptural language. Zulaykha, the mytho-poetic figure known as “the wife of the Aziz” in the Qur’an or “the wife of Potiphar” in the Bible, was championed by early Sufi poets, most likely those writing in Persian, who felt moved to give her a name. For a thousand years, Zulaykha has been as much celebrated as a lover in Muslim folk tradition and Persian and Mughal miniature painting, as the wife of Potiphar was cast as temptress in misogynistic cautionary tales and canonical Western art. Kurd writes in the vividly imagined voice of a Zulaykha who considers her Abrahamic lineage from its estranged and fragmented reality, asking what consolation human desire and divine longing might offer our shared present tense.

AUTHOR

Rahat Kurd

Rahat Kurd is a writer and poet based in Vancouver. Her most recent publication, The City That Is Leaving Forever (Talonbooks 2021), is a hybrid of correspondence and poetry exchanged between Vancouver and Kashmir over a five year period with poet Sumayya Syed. Kurd’s first collection of poems, Cosmophilia, was published by Talonbooks in 2015. Kurd draws on multilingual poetics and is especially interested in the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature. With writer and poet Meredith Quartermain, Kurd co-curated and co-hosted The Rhizomatic, a monthly online poetry series featuring a single guest in a deep-dive format, from September 2020 until June 2021. Kurd was the guest editor of the 2019 Summer Supplement issue of The Puritan online literary magazine, publishing poetry and fiction around the theme, “What does it mean to be a Muslim writer?” Commissioned by composer Brian Current , Kurd’s libretto “Light Upon Light” was performed as part of an oratorio, The River of Light, at the Vancouver Opera Festival in May 2019.