‘This sweeping yet grounded book is both a journey and a sojourn, travelling through cities of India that are storied and (to outsiders) relatively unsung. The scope and variety of the volume reflect the scale of India’s urban centres: Indian poets, English and American poets (the poets’ biographies alone weigh in at over a hundred pages), writing in a host of tongues and forms, and over hundreds of years, from the near-legendary to the youthfully contemporary, capture a dizzying spectrum of ancient and modern, splendour and squalor, class and caste, history and intimacy, rivers and lovers, temples and skyscrapers, alleys and flyovers, crowds, animals, cuisines, festivals, traffic jams, jasmine, smoke, moonlight. We view the city “from the highest place”, “where no one lives”, down to the particulars of the railway station dog, stroked on the head by “the eight armed railway timetable”. As editor Bilal Moin points out, the poet of the Indian city is less French flâneur than intellectual “loafer”, sipping tea at a café abuzz with flies and language. We are invited here to loaf with the poets, listening, watching, drinking it all in’

- A.E. Stallings

MacArthur-winning poet, translator and the Oxford Professor of Poetry

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‘At last, an anthology that celebrates what has been inadequately acknowledged: that some of the best writing on urban India is to be found in its poetry. Cities explode into life on these pages— as inspirations and provocations, as presences and absences, as challenging friends and beloved adversaries. Expansive, freewheeling and deeply affectionate, this book embraces the Indian sheher in a grimy and glorious bearhug’ ​

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- Arundhathi Subramaniam

Sahitya Akademi Award–winning poet and writer​

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‘More than a country of poems defined by its cities, Bilal Moin’s marvellous new anthology reveals for us a subcontinent of consciousness—a kaleidoscopic gathering of languages opening into languages and times warping into Time. Extremely rich and highly recommended’ ​

- Peter Cole

MacArthur-winning poet, translator and author of Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

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‘What is a city made of? Renamed streets, or razed histories? Monuments, or itineraries? As poet Deepankar Khiwani tells us in his poem on Mumbai, he sends guests to Ajanta, where he has never been. Bilal Moin’s unique and exhaustive anthology documents the experience of thirty-seven Indian cities through the voices of many fine poets. At the same time, as we appreciate the distinctiveness of each city and the diversity they stand for, we also realize their connectedness, their Indianness. This is a journey across India’s pulsing cities with poetry as guide’ ​

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- Mani Rao

Poet, scholar and translator