The Country Without a Post Office is a 1997 collection of poems written by the Kashmiri-American[a] poet Agha Shahid Ali.

[1] Some poems of the collection have epigraphs from poets such as W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Adela Florence Nicolson, Charles Simic, Zbigniew Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

[citation needed] By beginning with Mandelstam's poem, Ali tries to bring out the sheer scale of the tragedy in Kashmir by comparing it with Joseph Stalin's Russia.

This particular poem is dedicated to Molvi Abdul Hai, whose son Rizwan crossed over the border in the 1990s and was killed on the way back, dying unburied like many others.

This poem is introduced with the epigraph "They make desolation and call it peace",[b] by which Ali alludes that the whole population of Kashmir, both Hindu and Muslims, has become captive.

[13] The collection also has a letter, "Dear Shahid", informing the world about a region from which no news is reported, and where violent death is common and "Everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home".

[14] Through the metaphors of letter and post offices Ali also bears witness to the tragedy in the region, narrating it to the world at the same time, and further wants the peace to return.

In the poem, Shahid writes about "the land of doomed addresses",[3] referring to letters and packages that piled up in post offices and went undelivered.

[21] American writer Joseph Donahue wrote: "the poet envisions the devastation of his homeland, moving from the realm of the personal to an expansive poetry that maintains an integrity of feeling in the midst of political violence and tragedy.

[2][17] Kashmiri novelist Mirza Waheed wrote, "For many of us, growing up amid this horror, it was Shahid who shone a light on the darkness... when I first read Country... it was akin to listening to someone making sense of my world to me for the first time".

[17] A 2016 cultural evening organised in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) protesting the death sentences of two Kashmiri rebels convicted of 2001 Indian Parliament attack, which led to the sedition row involving Kanhaiya Kumar, was titled 'The Country Without a Post Office'.

[8] In 2019, Kashmiri author Mirza Waheed referenced the title in his tweet: "Kashmir is now officially The Country Without a Post Office.

[17] Soon after the revocation of Article 370 in 2019 and the bifurcation of the state, a communications blackout prompted Carnatic musician T. M. Krishna to recite Shahid's poem.

[17][26] In September 2019, the Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune ran an editorial titled "Country Without a Post Office".