**Love Songs from Bukhara** (The Bukhara Silk Road Chronicles)

Love Songs from Bukhara is the opening volume of the Bukhara Trilogy — 360 poems written in the lineage of Rumi, Hafiz, Omar Khayyam, and Rudaki, the record of an American teacher who arrived in one of the oldest cities on the Silk Road for a six-week summer English-immersion program in 2021 and, in every meaningful sense, never left.These are the love songs of the Traveler: intimate, first-person, by turns wondering, humorous, devotional, and grief-struck. In them, Bukhara is not a setting but a beloved — a presence that is simultaneously the historical city of Uzbekistan, a woman, a teacher, and a cosmic principle, ancient and present at once, who watches everything and reveals almost nothing. Across the Persian ghazal, the haiku, and the modernist lyric, the poems trace the outer journey of falling irrevocably in love with a place: blue-glazed domes dissolving into indigo at dusk and repainted by dawn; the call to prayer from the Kalyan Minaret that has stood nine centuries because even Genghis Khan could not give the order to bring it down; the covered spice bazaars where an old man weighs saffron on a scale worn smooth by a thousand years of use.The volume opens the trilogy's central wager — the one it inherits from the Persian mystics: that the longing for the divine and the longing for the beloved are the same longing, and that the cry of the cut reed is not a complaint but music. The Traveler does not arrive with a theory of what is happening to him. He arrives, and Bukhara happens to him. His inadequacy before the city is his credential.Drawing its philosophy from the meeting of Persian Sufism and its older Zoroastrian inheritance, its hospitality from the Silk Road's ethic of exchange, and its music from Bukhara's UNESCO-protected Shashmaqam tradition, Love Songs from Bukhara is the first English poetic cycle written not from the seminary but from Bukhara's own dust. It is the outer voice of a single inexhaustible conversation continued in Wisdom Stones of Bukhara and completed in Postcards from Bukhara. Read more