Waqas Khwaja—Two Poems from No One Waits for the Train

15 October, 2024
“Evocative at many levels of Waqas Khwaja’s chosen literary ancestors such as Baba Farid, Bulle Shah, Kabir, and Nanak, No One Waits for the Train is a soulful meditation on the 1947 partition of British India. Khwaja’s poetry captures in image, narrative voice, and personal memory the terrible beauty of an innocence now lost, of a train that never arrives, of a platform strewn with bodies, of a pain that never ends, and a love in the valley that endures.” —Amritjit Singh, Langston Hughes Professor of African-American Literature, Ohio University

 

Waqas Khwaja

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waqas Khwaja is the Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College where he teaches courses in Postcolonial literature, British Romanticism, Gothic Literature, Literature of Empire, Victorian novel, 19th century poetry, and Creative Writing. He has published four collections of poetry, Hold Your Breath, No One Waits for the Train, Mariam’s Lament, and Six Geese from a Tomb at Medum, a literary travelogue Writers and Landscapes about his experiences as a fellow of the International Writers Program, University of Iowa, and three edited anthologies of Pakistani literature, Cactus, Mornings in the Wilderness, and Short Stories from Pakistan. He served as translation editor (and contributor) for Modern Poetry of Pakistan, a Pakistan Academy of Letters project supported by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, showcasing translations of poems by 44 poets from Pakistan’s national and regional languages. He guest-edited a special issue of scholarly articles on Pakistani Literature for the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and another, on Pakistani poetry, for Atlanta Review.

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