news | Thursday September 18, 2025

Hot Off the Press! The Book of Z Has Arrived!

Rahat Kurd’s gorgeous new collection The Book of Z is here to win hearts and minds. For a thousand years the story of Zulaykha – “the wife of Aziz” in the Qur’an – has been celebrated in classical and contemporary Persian and Urdu poetry. As the Biblical “wife of Potiphar” she has been just as indelibly cast as temptress in Western traditions. In The Book of Z, Kurd vividly imagines Zulaykha reflecting on what consolations human desire and divine longing might offer our shared present tense.⁠

An excerpt from “Introspective Ghazal”:

“Zulaykha only smiles when posing rivals clutch Yusuf ’s arm

His distracted face in blue phone- glow, though – there’s the sting –

the ever- present interruptibility of sex

No gossip stokes scandal like a supreme court misogynist
To corrode, to its very heart, the incorruptibility of sex

Could what passed between them be called a mere glance
if ex post facto legal jargon hid its a priori guarantee of sex?

I honour the poets and painters in whose mystic hearts
Zulaykha’s fidelity persists, exalting a spirituality of sex

Won’t Rahat bring this bakvaas to some decorous end?
Or will she persist in madness – to look for dignity in sex?”

The Book of Z reconsiders mystical possibilities, longing, above all, for divine union. Order your copy here.