In reading this particularly historicist study of the major Persian poet Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz Shirazi, I was reminded of Boris Pasternak's description of the writer of genius as "akin to the ordinary person […] the greatest and rarest representative of this type, its immortal expression." This is the first English monograph on Hafiz's verse that approaches him as one might any other poet, rather than with the sense of incomparability, perhaps even inexplicability, appropriate to the "tongue of the unseen realm" (lisān al-ghayb), as he came to be seen over the following centuries of canonization. The effect is achieved by moving back and forth constantly between his bayts and those of the other Persian poets with whom he shared patrons and listeners in Shiraz, who experienced the same cityscape and historical events in the chaotic 14th century CE. The book's central constellation consists of Hafiz, the Injuid princess Jahan Malik Khatun, and Nizam al-Din ʿUbaydullah Zakani, who is most (in)famous for his satires and profane verse, but whose more conventional ghazals are more relevant to Brookshaw's project. A host of other contemporary poets surround this triad, some of them relatively famous, such as Khvaju Kirmani and Salman Savaji, and others obscure. By losing the aura of incomparability, we gain a humane sense of Hafiz as a poet whose particular brilliance drew on and was spurred by a literary scene teeming with poets who were brilliant in many different ways. This leveling effect is further enhanced by the book's organization, which addresses one chapter each to six thematically organized catalogs of conventional elements. The first three chapters outline the conventions that poets deploy to gesture towards the place and time in which they compose, from the city of Shiraz as a literary topos (Chapter 1) to the contexts in which verse was recited and otherwise received (Chapter 2) to the beloveds who make up its primary topic (Chapter 3). These chapters emphasize the responsiveness of this poetic tradition to the world in which poets composed, as I will discuss below. In the second half of the book, focused on allusion (talmīh ), the poets' worldliness recedes somewhat as intertextuality comes to the fore, particularly the allusions that the poets make to tales of kings (Chapter 4), lovers (Chapter 5), and prophets (Chapter 6). These chapters are less exhaustive, dealing with Solomon but not David, Abraham's breaking of the idols but not his near-sacrifice of Ishmael. Sometimes, as Brookshaw points out, the stories perform such similar functions that they blur together. This increased selectivity produces chapters that cohere better and have more fully articulated arguments. This is especially true of the chapter on lovers, which shows how allusion mediated the intergeneric crosspollination of romance masnavi and ghazal. It also contains the most sustained and rewarding close readings in the book, focused on the ways that Jahan deploys the scenarios and personae of heteroerotic romance in her ghazals ...