Imtiaz Dharker is an artist as well as a poet. In The terrorist at my table, the poems are accompanied by Dharker's own illustrations. She is accomplished in both fields of art and poetry, having had eleven solo exhibitions of pen-and-ink drawings around the world, including in India, Hong Kong, USA, the UK, and France. Dharker was one of the poet/artists featured in the Poet Slash Artist exhibition curated by poet Lemn Sissay and the art guru Hans Ulrich Obrist for Manchester International Festival 2021. In a review of this exhibition written in The Guardian, the author writes, "In classical Chinese, Arabic and Persian poetry, calligraphy connects the verbal and visual in ways that make poetry and art practically the same thing" (Jones). This connection between poetry and art through calligraphy can be seen in Dharker's piece "My Breath."
In "Tissue," all practices that involve using a pen are layered into a metaphor about building materials:
An architect could use all this,
place layer over layer, luminous
script over numbers over line,
and never wish to build again with brick (Lines 25-28).
Dharker's work in various mediums informs her complex approach to engaging the senses in her poetry.
