Dilruba Ahmed interview with The Collagist

Words from The Collagist:

Three of Dilruba Ahmed’s poems appear in the March 2010 issue of the Collagist. She is the author of Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), winner of the 2010 Bakeless Literary Prize for poetry, selected by Arthur Sze and awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Ahmed’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, and Pebble Lake Review. Her work will also appear in the forthcoming anthology, Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010).

Can you talk about the inspiration for “Venice During an Election Year in the U.S.,” “Cathedral,” and “Rumor”? What was on your mind while you were writing these poems?

“Venice” and “Cathedral” are based in part on my experiences backpacking through Europe with my husband. We traveled amidst the heightened anxieties about terrorism as well as anti-American and anti-Muslim sentiments–all the while feeling dismayed by the growing popularity of an incompetent leader who had most likely entered office by fraud. While none of this appears with any specificity in the poem, in Venice I found a landscape that seemed willing to house some of the disillusionment we’d been experiencing. 



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