I remember, to this day, where I was when I read the first poem I fell in love with – Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost. There I was, along with my 25 classmates, of course. A lot of life has passed since then, and a lot of other poems my heart has found a home in. But the poems you read and love when you’re young carry a strange responsibility: they must introduce you to the genre itself, shaping your sense of what a poem is meant to do. You don’t know it then, but these are the lines that will carry you through life and its many loves and tragedies.

To be young is to be full of hope, almost foolishly. But it’s not only that. It is also to feel yourself standing at the threshold of inheritance and possibility, fully aware that the direction you choose might mark the rest of your life. Jashn, the first anthology of the Pakistan Youth Poet Laureate Programme, is perhaps born from that very threshold. Bringing together nineteen poets writing in Urdu and English, it is less of an anthology and more of a quiet declaration of voices learning to shape themselves.

Jashn is not a long book, and at just under a hundred pages, it feels almost deceptively modest. It features poems on identity, memory, language, but also on grief, desire and political fracture. The editors have managed to curate a living document that feels like a snapshot of the literary temperament of a new generation of poets in Pakistan.

Michael Cirelli, one of the two editors and founder of the National Youth Poet Laureate Programme, has spent over two decades shaping youth poetry across the US. Dr Sara Zaidi, co-editor of the anthology, an educator and community advocate, brings years of experience in youth development and community work. Together, they lead the Pakistan Youth Poet Laureate Programme.

Some of what’s in Jashn does have that early-stage rawness, the sense of a young poet trying something once just to see if it fits; but most of it is engaging. “And there is a dream / I don’t tell anyone about / where I have a love that does not burn / when I hold it in my arms,” Aiman Tahir Khan writes in Only In A Dream. Ayesha Owais, in I Am Making A Joke, turns the small, ordinary rituals of a shared life into a fragile language of love. “I am making / a joke over & over /At the kitchen counter / where you whisk your eggs,” she writes.

The poems gathered here were written as strange little experiments, all left exactly as they are.

Read this way, the anthology feels like a powerful collection of emotions, in which young poets are trying to make sense of their lives and times. Mashallah Saif, in her politely scathing Qabool Hai, writes about the darkness that continues to engulf the lives of so many young girls in our society. “Mujhay sab kuchh yaad hai / Meri zindagi ka pehla phool / meri bhool, meray liye aaye rishtay / Aik awaaz meray kaan kay parday chaat gayee/ Larkay waalay aayein gay” she writes.

Qudsia Zaidi’s Chaar Deewaari isn’t exactly little, though not long either. But it is long enough to capture a child’s earliest world, naming aloud the terrors of abuse and the things many grow up learning to keep quiet about. ‘“Masal di jaye kali khilnay se agar pehlay / Tau chah kar bhi kisi taur khil nahin sakti / Shikast khurda jismon ko zakhmi ruhon ko / Rah-i-farar kisi taur mil nahin sakti.”

Bangles by Batool Hassan is a ledger of everything a woman’s hands do, all the unseen labour that keeps a life running, often at the cost of the very person those hands belong to. “My mother’s hands hit me / my mother’s hands hit the brakes / my mother’s hands hit bottom / self-advocacy.”

Some of the anthology’s strongest pieces confront political realities head-on. Ayesha Faisal Malik’s Iran-i-Sagheer, with its stanzas visually “structured to form an image of a complete map of Kashmir,” balances form and sentiment with surprising skill. “When you were younger. You found yourself here, / after you had been rescued from the war, / but before we were Free.”

There is longing in Muhammad Hassan’s Jaisay Ghata ho Chhaayee, devotion in Tahir Tauseef Wattoo’s Tosha-i-Dyaar-i-Wafa Rahay Tau Waqar-i-Dast Dua Rahay, and a sense of estrangement in Hanniyah Ahmad Khan’s Respiration. Usman Habib tries to name the way hope expands in Yeh Aitraf Hai Aaur Husn-i-Zan Say Barh Kar Hai, and Sherdil Awais Rashid imagines a lineage shaped by resistance and the people who make us, in Dissent Theory.

Nothing here has been polished into sameness. These poems were written as strange little experiments, all left exactly as they were. Jashn may be a first volume, but it carries the force of a beginning. For now, it is exactly what the title promises: a celebration of voices finding their way into the world.

Book: Jashn (جشن): 

Pakistan Youth Poet Laureate Anthology Volume I

Editors: Michael Cirelli and Dr Sara Zaidi

Publisher: The Peepul Press, 2025

Pages: 83

Price Rs 5,000

The reviewer is a staff member.