Los Angeles Review 2023 Poetry Award: Waqas Khwaja

Final Judge: M. Soledad Caballero

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night prowlers in fellowship by Waqas Khwaja

night prowlers in fellowship by Waqas Khwaja

submerged reefs

submarine canyons and spiked ridges

knobbled full of foreboding

spiraled with disquiet

scarred and slumbering

clonal polyps bud

sessile

secreting calcareous skeletons

sea asparagus and broccoli heads

silent stalkers

emerging at sundown

pitching long barbed tentacles

to seize

floating zooplankton

keeping vigil

for seabird guano 

feeding on sunlight

and zooxanthellae living

within their very tissues

night prowlers in fellowship

plant and polyp

waltzing in secret

poiesis in limestone

untwisting and uncoiling

from sticky larvae

cosmic debris 

and bird poop

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Waqas Khwaja (he/his/him) has published four collections of poetry, Hold Your Breath, No One Waits for the Train, Mariam’s Lament, and Six Geese from a Tomb at Medum, a literary travelogue Writers and Landscapes about his experiences as a fellow of the International Writers Program, University of Iowa, and three edited anthologies of Pakistani literature, Cactus, Mornings in the Wilderness, and Short Stories from Pakistan comprising original work by Pakistani Anglophone writers as well as translations from Urdu and Punjabi poetry and fiction. He served as translation editor (and contributor) for Modern Poetry of Pakistan, a Pakistan Academy of Letters project supported by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, showcasing translations of poems by 44 poets from Pakistan’s national and regional languages, and has guest-edited a special issue on Pakistani poetry for Atlanta Review and another devoted to scholarly essays on Pakistani literature for the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature. Khwaja is the Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College where he teaches courses in literature and creative writing. His poems have appeared in US, South Asian, European, African, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, and Latin American publications, literary journals, and anthologies. Website: wkhwaja.agnesscott.org

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25 March 2024