Claudia Ott has masterfully woven a colorful carpet of love poetry that invites all lovers to linger and serves as a love letter to the Orient. Her enchanting anthology gathers poems from three millennia and various cultures and languages: from Babylon and Egypt to the intricate love poetry of the Islamic Middle Ages up to the present, from al-Andalus in the West to the Indus in the East. The language of love is the mother tongue of the Orient. No other region in the world has produced as much beautiful poetry about love. What is remarkable is that across time and space, the words and images of love resemble each other and continue to reference one another to this day. Some poems are candidly erotic, while others are artfully stylized, dealing with beautiful men and women, consuming longing, and paradises of pleasure.