Srinagar, May 10 -- In The Chill in the Bones, Wani Nazir gathers the dust of his homeland and turns it into poetry that aches.

This haunting collection is part lament, part tribute, part reckoning. It holds the emotional temperature of Kashmir, a place that in the poet's words is "an Eden whose Adam / has been long exiled to / uncertainty."

Reading this book feels like stepping into a graveyard of dreams, where every poem is a headstone, but also a flower.

Nazir doesn't write about Kashmir from a distance. He is inside it, within the silence that follows rhythm, within the pages of newspapers that no longer shock, within the skin of a people still trying to remember how to feel.

The poems are not journalistic. They are not political ...