Children, Butterfly, Flower

For the past four decades, N. M. Danish has been creating one of the most singular bodies of work in Urdu poetry, one grounded within the African diasporic literary tradition of Négritude that also draws on classical Urdu forms to create a black, leftist poetics that is entirely his own.

A black Pakistani poet of African and Baloch descent, Danish grew up in Karachi, in the working-class neighborhood of Lyari. Shaped by the tradition of labor activism in Lyari, and influenced by the Négritude movement and the Harlem Renaissance, Danish utilizes both free verse and the more traditional form of the ghazal to create haunting, atmospheric poems full of stark imagery, in which a sense of repression and disquiet pervades, yet the possibility of political resistance persists.

Bringing together work from Danish’s only published collection, as well as later poems written after emigrating to the US, Children, Butterfly, Flower marks the publication of a unique and powerfully modern voice, in the first English language translation of a black poet from South Asia.