Jashn, the first anthology of the Pakistan Youth Poet Laureate Program, is a landmark publication; a celebration of coming-of-age voices in poetry. With nineteen poets writing in Urdu and English, it is an introduction to a breadth of writers, and an invitation into the evolving literary consciousness of Pakistan’s youth.

The anthology opens with a simple structure: one English poem followed by one Urdu poem, a sequence that is repeated throughout the book. This layout proves to be quite effective. It highlights a sort of continuity and dialogue between English and Urdu. It also sustains a nice cadence, giving space for resonance and contrast. 

The poems range across a wide variety of themes, showing us what is on the minds of Pakistan’s upcoming writers. These young poets ponder over abstract thoughts with dexterity. One prose poem by Ayesha Owais, ‘The Day Your House Smelt Like Burnt Tar’, wrestles with abstraction and yearning. It contains the line, “I sang out a thought imitating a ghazal”, a self-aware gesture that captures the spirit of many pieces here: young poets trying out forms, bending them, making them new. Equally powerful – though in a more contemplative register – is Tahir Tauseef Wattoo’s ‘Mein Waqt Ki Sarhad Se Guzar Kyun Nahi Jaata’. This Urdu poem dwells on the existential weight of time, reminiscent of the great classical poets, though refracted through a contemporary voice. Its power lies in its restraint and how it allows for its lines to resonate quietly and hauntingly.

There is also political urgency, which arrives most powerfully in ‘Iran-e-Sagheer’ by Ayesha Faisal Malik. Written in solidarity with Kashmir, the poem arranges its stanzas into the shape of the Kashmir map. What might have been a visual gimmick becomes, in Ayesha’s hands, a moving visual-textual expression of longing. The words reach for liberation while the form itself insists on geographical wholeness. In ‘Dokhtar-e-Angrez’ by Hanniyah Ahmad Khan, the eighteen-year-old poet writes of identity shaped by migration, heritage, and language. A Pakistani with Afghan roots, she meditates on the guilt of speaking English more fluently than her mother’s own Pashto and Farsi, of preferring to sit on floors and to eat with her hands, but being called, jokingly, “Dokhtar-e-Angrez” – daughter of the English – by her grandmother. It is a poem that innocently and sincerely articulates a complicated, postcolonial coming-of-age, written with remarkable depth (especially for her age).

Rumaisa Maryam Samir’s The Light Asks Us to Fix the Country is written “after Faiz Ahmed Faiz”. The last words of each line reproduce the opening line of Faiz’s Subh-e-Azaadi: “This stained daybreak, this night-bitten dawn/This is not the dawn we were waiting for so eagerly.” The “Light” in her poem becomes a restless, pained presence, lamenting that the wounds of Partition remain unhealed. Samir personifies the Light as a witness to post-Partition Pakistan, carrying the grief of a nation still struggling with fractures inherited from its birth. The poem’s lament is piercing: “And after the carnage, where is our place in all this? We stain in the same places our grandparents stained”. It is a work that refuses to let history settle, insisting on its continued presence in the now.

In her other poem, ‘My Therapist Says Loneliness is Normal,’ she shifts scale, dwelling instead on internet-age estrangements but still coming back to speculate family and belonging. Together, these poems reveal a poet negotiating the entanglement of the political and the personal with utmost care.

Sherdil Awais Rashid’s ‘Arms Poetic’ concludes the collection with a fitting exuberant ode to poetry itself. Reminiscent of the playful style of the Asian American poet Chen Chen, it speculates and meditates on the nature of poems:

“Like most else in the world
however, a poem will never be, or be for,
just one thing. You can, for example,
Poem yourself for war
Keep your troubles at poem’s length
Or find a lover, walk with him
poem in poem, everything
at your back.”

The editors have resisted the temptation to over-curate. The anthology does not flatten or streamline its poets; it lets them be, even when their formatting styles differ wildly. This decision foregrounds the poets themselves, giving readers a sense of their developing bodies of work. 

The anthology’s greatest achievement, though, is its ability to hold together contrasts Urdu and English, tradition and experimentation, rootedness and global intertextuality. The words of these poets give a sort of tassali, a comfort: that this is a generation of writers both deeply in tune with its literary inheritances and unafraid to extend them into new terrains, attentive to their world’s wounds yet willing to dream despite them.

Jashn is a cultural milestone. If this is the first volume, one can only anticipate what future ones will bring. For now, Jashn offers us precisely what its title suggests: a celebration.