15.1 Spring/Summer 2017

Caught in a Loop

Contributor’s Marginalia: Anne-Marie Thompson on “Lowlight” by Dilruba Ahmed

Dilruba Ahmed’s “Lowlight” is a poem of gestures and suggestions. More vignette than narrative, the poem’s sentences, like the images therein, cycle around each other, “[c]aught in a loop,” never quite settling or resolving. I was drawn to Ahmed’s evocation of inertia and to the poem’s opposing images and themes—fluttering and spilling; closeness and distance; familiarity and strangeness.

In writing this piano piece, my aim was not to represent fully the intricacies of the poem, nor to “set” the poem’s text to music; my hope, instead, was to reflect musically some of Ahmed’s themes, particularly the scene’s cycling and instability.




Originally trained as a pianist, Anne-Marie Thompson has taught writing and music at Johns Hopkins University, Lincoln University, and Westminster College. Her first book, Audiation, was selected by Marilyn Nelson for the 2013 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Her poems have been anthologized in Pearson’s Literature: An Introduction (13/e), and published in Ploughshares, Southwest Review, storySouth, and other journals. She works as a technical writer for a software company and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband.