blood-letting is a compilation of one hundred and twenty-one original, unpublished, two-lined poems with each poem printed on one side of a 5X3 page. With a total word count of 750 words, it is written and designed for sporadic and meditative re-readings by a contemporary audience trained on sound bites and tweets.

The collection draws on the idiom, imagery, and mood of thirteenth century devotional Sufi poetry (Rumi, Khusro, Hafez), the 19th century Urdu ghazal (Ghalib, Mir, Momin), and mid-twentieth century American confessional poetry. It includes found poetry from dive bar bathrooms, as well as references from the Quran.

The format of the book, designed to look, feel, and weigh like a brick or block of poetry, lends itself to be flipped through for chance encounters with the individual poems. The total number of poems, at one hundred and twenty one, is eleven squared; eleven is considered one of the most sacred numbers in Sufi Islam.

Playful, accessible, and unintimidating in both format and content, blood-letting appeals to poetry enthusiasts as well as non-readers, alike. Currently, this manuscript seeks a publisher.

Mustafa Samdani completed a Master’s degree in Performance Studies from Brown University in 2006 where his work focused on religion, ritual, and theatre. Currently, he works as an Urdu-English translator for South Asia expert, Dr. Christine Fair (Georgetown University), producing book-length translations of militant propaganda distributed by a variety of Pakistani terrorist organizations. Dr. Fair and Samdani have book contracts for their collaborative work with Hurst Publishers (London) and Oxford University Press India. Samdani divides his time between Somerville MA and Pakistan, where he was raised. He is working on his debut novel, and is half done with his second volume of poetry in the same format as blood-letting.