Touching on a rather understudied aspect of the history of the borderland between Iran and the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the eighteenth century, the paper discusses how identity was negotiated in popular Turkophone poetic discourse at the time of the final collapse of Safavid rule and the rise of Nadir Shah’s regime in Iran. It will use as a case study the unique copy of the divan of an otherwise unknown poet by the poetic pen-name Rahima, who lived in the vicinity of Tabriz and was likely at the head of a local Sufi network. Analyzing some of Rahima’s poetry, especially his anti-Ottoman propaganda pieces, his versified commentary on problems in Islamic law, and his narrative poems about the Hajj, I will argue that despite confessionalization and linguistic and literary vernacularization in both the aforesaid realms in the previous ca. two and a half centuries, there was a distinct local literary and confessional discourse in Turkophone Qizilbash networks that was not dominated by either the Ottoman or the Safavid religio-political center, but was constructed in a dynamic dialogue with both and appealed to local sensibilities.