Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09): Dilruba was recently interviewed by fellow alum Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) for the American Literary Review.

At a recent poetry reading, an audience member described poets as people who have a sixth sense, a kind of super-sensory power that allows them to detect things that are not readily apparent to others. I think that’s probably accurate—that poets possess a kind of hyper-sensitivity to people and places, to relationships and history, to language and its capacity to capture/shape/disrupt experience, and to the collision of imagination and perception in making sense of the world. So maybe it’s just that sensitivity that lends poets the kind of double vision you describe—permitting them to fashion, for example, from two unlike things a powerful metaphor that transforms understanding and helps us see the world anew, or to somehow stand simultaneously here and there...[Read the full interview]…

Dilruba is the author of Dhaka Dust: Poems (2011, Graywolf), winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Poetry.