Mehak F. Khan
Dr. Mehak F. Khan is a writer and academic, currently Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She has a PhD in English and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a founding editor of Tasavvur, a magazine for South Asian speculative fiction.
Poetry (translation)
Nazm
in my dreams
I am installing an oxygen plant
and dying with every dying person.
…all we can do is “make a ventilator out of poems,” like Haafi, and live in them, reminiscent of John Donne’’s injunction to “build in sonnets pretty rooms.” But although Haafi’s language is tender like Donne’s, it is not lush like his, and the spareness of his Urdu…