Postcards from Bukhara

Postcards from Bukhara is the culminating volume of the Bukhara Trilogy and its boldest. Where the first two books form a diptych - the Traveler's outer voice in Love Songs from Bukhara, the city's inner voice in Wisdom Stones of Bukhara - this third book breaks the architecture entirely. There are no chapters, no titles, no scaffolding. 360 dispatches arrive one by one and accumulate, until the world they describe becomes a complete circle.
The form enacts the content. Postcards do not have chapters. They arrive in no particular order. They make no sustained argument. They are complete in themselves, and together they constitute a world. Here the separation that drove the first two books has dissolved: the city is no longer across a distance to be longed for but is writing to the reader directly, dispatch by dispatch. "Bukhara has already become like us - now we must become like Bukhara."
These are the poems of accumulation as truth. The four seasons confer their gifts; the Persian New Year anchors the Silk Road calendar; the Vizier makes his final appearances and is, as always, outlasted. Pari - the fairy-spirit of the older, pre-Islamic Iranian world - appears around the corners, signaling the return of the layer that runs beneath the mosques. And the trilogy turns, at the last, back toward Stihia - the primal elemental origin that precedes all cities, all knowledge, all civilization: "you were limitless once; find your way back."
Drawing on the epistolary tradition, on Persian Sufism and its Zoroastrian inheritance, and on the post-dissolution testimony of the mystic who has crossed the final station, Postcards from Bukhara completes the conversation begun in Love Songs from Bukhara and answered in Wisdom Stones of Bukhara. It can be read on its own; the last word leads back to the first.