Ahmad Faraz, the renowned Urdu poet, was born near Peshawar in 1931 and died in Islamabad in 2008. His literary production includes thirteen volumes of poetry and spanned six decades, including the end of British rule and the establishment of the state of Pakistan, where he spent most of his career and founded the Pakistan Academy of Letters. In addition to writing popular and frequently-performed love poetry, Faraz followed the great modernist Urdu writers in being an outspoken commentator on politics. Following his criticism of Zia-ul-Huq’s military government and subsequent arrest, Faraz lived in self-imposed exile in Canada and Europe for six years in the 1980s during which time he continued to write against the regime. The recipient of many accolades, Faraz received one of Pakistan’s highest civilian honors, the Hilal-e-Imtiaz in 2004, but returned the award in 2006 in protest against the Musharraf regime. “Eye Bank” was published in 1983, in a collection entitled Nabeena Sheher Main Aieena (Mirror in Blind City).

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is Assistant Professor of English and comparative literature at Williams College. She is writing an academic book on the politics of the epidemic imaginary in colonial letters and a collection of poems, Janaab-e Shikva after the Urdu poet Iqbal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Triple Canopy, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Fence, The Bennington Review, Poetry, The Boston Review, and other venues.