Ghalib is the Shakespeare of India. His poems offer visions of passionate love in a merging of the human and divine.

Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan (1797-1869), known by his pen names Asad (¿lion¿) and Ghalib (¿superior¿), is the famous romantic and mystical poet of the Mughal Empire (1526-1858) in India. He is the most-beloved and most widely read poet of the Urdu language, the dominant language of northern India and Pakistan that emerged through the blending of Hindustani with Arabic and Persian. He is known for the beautiful prose of his letters and in fact he brought about a paradigm shift in how letters were written and communicated during his time. His focus on informal yet beautiful writing, rather than flowery formal prose, was his greatest contribution to the art of writing Urdu letters. He is also arguably the world¿s most extraordinary writer of poems in the ghazal form (though certain Persian poets such as Hafez and Rumi give him a run for the money). Tony Barnstone is Professor of English and Environment Studies at Whittier College and the author of 19 books and a music CD. He has served as the Visiting Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Bowling Green State University and as the Visiting Professor of Translation in the Ph.D. Program at the University of California, Irvine. He has a Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to Pulp Sonnets, his books of poetry include Beast in the Apartment; Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry; The Golem of Los Angeles which won the Poets Prize and the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry; Sad Jazz: Sonnets; and Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone, and a chapbook of poems titled Naked Magic (Main Street Rag). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose and an editor of literary textbooks. His books in these areas include Mother Is a Bird: Sonnets of Yi Poet; Chinese Erotic Poetry; The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry; Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry; Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei; The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters; and the textbooks Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Literatures of Asia, and Literatures of the Middle East. His bilingual Spanish/English selected poems, Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (1999-2012) appeared in 2014. He has also co-edited the anthologies Dead and Undead Poems and Monster Verse. Among his awards are the Poets Prize, Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Festival, the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the California Arts Council, the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry and the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry. His CD of folk rock/blues songs (in collaboration with singer-songwriters Ariana Hall and John Clinebell, based upon Tongue of War and titled Tokyös Burning: World War II Songs) is available on Amazon.com, Rhapsody, and CD Baby. His website is https://www.whittier.edu/academics/english/barnstone
Bilal Shaw is a Kashmiri scientist working in quantum information science who did his PhD at the University of Southern California. In the past he has worked on DNA-based computation and nanotechnology, software architecture, and theoretical self-assembly. He has worked as a scientist in the Analytics department at ID Analytics in San Diego, where he applied machine-learning techniques to build statistical risk models for fraud and credit space and at the meditation app Headspace. He is also an accomplished poet.

Acknowledgments 7
Introduction 3
Ghalib¿s Life and Times 3
The Religious and Erotic Traditions 7
Ghazals as the Blues 13
Opening Up the Rhyme 15
The Problem with Repetends 19
Rhetorical Play and Wit 20
The Poems 26
Out of Heartfire 28
The Jewel of the Party 29
At This Party 31
The Spell of Desire 33
Murderess 34
Executioner 36
The Idol 38
A Direction in Which to Pray 39
What Comes 41
Seeking a Gash 43
Enough 46
Enter My Dream 48
Thirst 49
A Smaller Miracle 50
Wine Wave 52
Stay Drunk 54
The Empty Cup 55
A Stunned Drop of Wine 57
Then 58
The Betel Nut 60
My Desires Are Legion 62
The Sound of My Own Failure 64
The Accounting 66
Deadbeat Heart 67
Pawned to This Cruel Life 68
She Pawned Her Heart 70
The Dead Lamp 71
Everything Will Be Dust 72
Red Flowers Hidden in Dust 74
Handful of Dust 77
Dust 78
Why Sing the Blues? 79
Why? 81
What We Say 83
Glances Lined with Kohl 85
Kohl for the Eyes 86
Hennaed Feet 87
I Am Human, After All 89
The Stare 91
Rupture 92
The Face in the Mirror 94
More to Say 95
Some Life 97
When the Dead Rise 98
A Footprint in Paradise 99
Be Generous 100
Veil 101
What? 102
The Cure for Life 104
Infected by Love 106
No Medicine 107
Where Is My Heart? 109
Famine 111
A Woundgift 113
Who Cares? 114
Heartgrief School 116
The Desert Sea 118
Wasteland 119
The Traveler 121
Call Down Lightning 122
Lunatic Beggar 123
Madness of the Night of Separation 124
Blood-Filled Eyes 126
A Rose in the Dirt 127
Give Me Lunacy, at Least 129
How Tight Is the World? 131
The Tulip 132
Dew on a Red Tulip 133
Nothing Is What Breathes from Me 135
No One 137
About the Translators: 138