Author | |
---|---|
Imprint | |
Publication Year | 2014 |
Language | English |
Edition | 2 |
Binding | Hardcover |
Pages | 364 |
As Is, Where Is
$35
About the Book
Related products
-
Brouhahas Of Cocks
About the Book
Hardback awakening The air is thick, and has revived my books, anticipating the first spell of a Bombay monsoon. Ambient moisture has slaked pages that shuffle and twist, arise to a wakefulness, unleaving. Feeling the discomfort of nearness,
-
Learn from the Almond Leaf
About the Book
In these her late poems, the volcano that is Eunice de Souza is still erupting. As in her early work too, what she here ‘upchucks’ is lava, molten lines that burn and glow and leave a permanent mark. The tone, as before, is casual, bantering, close to the spoken idiom that is uniquely hers. When terrible things happen the tone changes, quickens, then relaxes again. Life is bemusing, ludicrous; death even more so. In the work of no other poet I can think of do you find such brevity and grandeur, swiftness of utterance and the unbearable weight of grief, unbearable because de Souza is so dry-eyed. ‘The crone’s still capable/of spite’ she writes in one poem, the old necklace-of-skulls self-irony intact, except that in her case ‘spite’ also means ‘wisdom’. It is easy to forget that the crone is deeply moral as well, and like any moral being she too feels that she’s lived ‘In the wrong season.’ There is plenty in these spare but unsparing poems to remind us of the classical virtues we associate with Bhartrhari, for instance, or a Latin epigrammatist like Martial. These are poems to live by. In time, they will come to be seen as classics of our literature, as many of her earlier poems already are. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
-
Durable Transit
About the Book
Ravi Shankar’s poems are immortal in the flesh, finding in The life of the mind its interpretations, its instrumentality. The surpassing, transient, lyrical moment; and in the life of the World’s body the permanent, unflinching presence of thought, Unconfined by time and space. They are the verbal artifacts of a Singular, many-sided, and distinguished consciousness.Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri Engorged with image, thick, viscous and churning, Ravi Shankar’s Poems have the density of mercury as well as its fluidity and Mobility…The energy is visceral. The language is restless, hungry For surprise, the register swinging between the formal and the Demotic (both American and Indian). Underlying this is an Almost voluptuous need to embrace myth, history, metaphysics And pop culture, and bring all of it into a single book, and Sometimes a single poem. This is matched by an alertness to form with references ranging from the Bop to the pada — making for A playful, stylistically supple poetry. – Arundhathi Subramaniam Ravi Shankar’s poems have a fine-tuned sense of form, a rare Delight in language. Through wit and abstraction, they reveal a Metaphysics of longing, binding us to the elements of our moving World. – Meena Alexander
Ravi Shankar is truly, now, one of America’s finest younger poets.-Dick Allen
-
40 under 40
About the Book
“The Indian poetry scene has always been considered to be lively, but no better evidence of this fact exists than 40/40. Here we have forty contemporary Indian poets under forty years old, and what we encounter is extraordinarily timely and compelling, providing us the trace of a newly emergent lyric consciousness, simultaneously local and cosmopolitan. Here we have Akhil Katyal reminiscing about being ten years old and growing up in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, “battling the stars of a virus”; we have Chandramohan S’ witty “Plus-Size Poem” that “does not opt for offshore liposuction”; and we have the speaker of Ishita Basu Mallik’s sonnenizio about going commando under her jeans and turning her beloved into ” an electric remnant bombarding” her “bones with wavelengths.” From Jennifer Robertson’s prose poem about Jesus and Jaipur, Rohan Chhetri’s universe in braille, or Shelly Bhoil’s typographical experimentation, this anthology shows us the pulse of a generation coming of age in an era of mass media and Hindu mythology. I have no doubt that this will be one of those books that when looked back on will have been proven to be seminal and indispensable, introducing us to both the present and the future of Indian poetry.” -Ravi Shankar, Pushcart Prize winning poet and Founding Editor of Drunken Boat * THIS ANTHOLOGY HAS BEEN EDITED BY NABINA DAS & SEMEEN ALI
-
Cyborg Proverbs
Das’ poetry more than delivers on the promise made in the penultimate lines of her titular Cyborg Proverbs, offering its reader the gift of penetrating (in)sight through thoughts “as precise as suspicion”. Her syllables breathe aloud, like hushes that unassumingly gasp in the gaps between echoes, in the interstitial moments of alighting bird wings, or roots that braid the air, or the slipperiness of netted fish, and the gush of rain as it nestles its way into the crevices of walls and swells its way through its parasitical, residential act.
Das exquisitely reimagines syntax and her frequently anthropomorphic poems shape-shift upon each ensuing page, making Cyborg Proverbs an enviable feat, aided in no small measure by her studied, patient, bird-watcher gaze and her unspeakable lust for articulating the tacitly sensual.
-
Last-Ditch Ecstasy
About the Book
Adrian Grima in collaboration with his talented and unusually resourceful translator, Albert Gatt – has produced a rich and memorable compilation of poems. Their geographical and emotional stew is international in its flavours yet always Maltese in its complex marinations. Grima succeeds in being – and these are potent combinations – both lyrical and true-to-life, both tender and unblinking, both comforting and challenging. His collection is a thought-provoking joy.- Jim Crace
How can the soul survive the world’s brutality. This is the essential, unanswerable question that Adrian Grima asks in and through his poems, beautifully translated from the Maltese by Albert Gatt. Taut with unexpected collusions, the poems walk the tightrope tensions of time and space. Turmoil, both emotional and political, is contained within the ascetic rigour of the lines; the mysteries of the distant are brought closer through eyes and lips, taste and touch. In Grima’s world, a lull can be as keen as a knife, blood can be the ultimate betrayal. An arterial anxiety courses through his work. Between “thistle and sun”, between skin and skin, between “departure and return”, the poet repeatedly alerts us to the heart-breaking fragility of the body, besieged. Coexistent with his bruising awareness of damage is his faith in contact, in simple human pleasures, a conversation, a pot of flowers, a meal. Deeply intelligent and moving, here is a book with “sky in its wings, migration in its heart”. Read it, be shattered, then soar.- Sampurna Chattarji