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In Yesterday, Tomorrow collects over six years of poetry and photographs. The work focuses closely on my hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, and deals with themes of migration, estrangement, and nostalgia. The book was designed to thread together the poetry and images, treating both elements as equal. The book also tells a story through its sequence, giving readers a visual tour through the bustling city, while poetry written from my new home in the US entangles memories of childhood, immigration, and family.

$64 Add to Cart

192 pages

9.25in × 12.25in

ISBN: 979-8-218-91991-7

First edition of 250

I don’t think you wake up one day and decide to make a book. This book began about six years ago when I was writing the first poems, when I had first left Karachi, my home, my family, and arrived in the US. The thought of making a book did not really enter my mind. I was quite simply just writing and returning to these poems. Many have changed so much that it's hard to recognize the first version of them but some aspect of them still remains. The poems were written in a four-year period where I barely went home and the photos come from a year in which I finally went back.

In Karachi, each day, I would wake up and just roam the city. The photos are of the streets and people and places I love and that exist in reality and memory, although often differently.

It could have never existed as a poetry book and a photo book separately. The book considers how photo is often part of poem and poem part of photo. I became obsessed with the long lineage of illuminated manuscripts of image and text in South Asia. This photopoetry book is a result of that obsession and many others that have happened over these years. The pages condense space between a poem written in my New York apartment and an experience in my home in Karachi. It is a study of family history, South Asian history, and the history of poetry in the region and how separateness does not exist and how language and time intersect in the body and the page.

I hope you can walk these streets some day.

The book was designed by James Blue. It was printed in Lithuania by KOPA Printing House.

It took over a year and a half to design and produce. It was over a year and a half of conversations and changes and countless proofs and photo re-edits and thoughts and growth and reflection and dreaming. Making this book has been the most difficult and most gratifying thing I’ve done in my life so far.

In Yesterday, Tomorrow
by Raza Ayoob

ISBN: 979-8-218-91991-7

stockists:
Tone Deaf Studios, NYC

designed by James Blue
typeset in Mercure
printed in Lithuania by
KOPA Printing House

papers:
250gsm Arena Rough Ivory
100gsm Munken Pure Rough
115gsm Sirio Colour Rough

© 2026 Raza Ayoob. All rights reserved.

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