I Am the Beggar of the World

Eliza Griswold

Paperback

9780374535186

Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan

An eye-opening collection of clandestine poems by Afghan women

“A landay has only a few formal properties. Each has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line; thirteen in the second. The poem ends with the sound ma or na. Sometimes landays rhyme, but more often not. In Pashto, they lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content…”