| Author | |
|---|---|
| Imprint | |
| Language | |
| Edition | |
| Pages | 116 |
| Binding |
About the Book
Yamini Dand Shah, with this new book Abstract Oralism, captures both precisely and remarkably the mysterious and elusive world of the Kachchh of Western Gujarat. Her metaphors and similes transport the reader towards this ancient terrain where Indus Valley peoples once flourished. Conceptually advanced and sophisticated, the poetry of this book causes us to reconsider our place in the world: in the light of the author’s extraordinary perception that translates earthly experience into a uniquely beautiful expression of the human condition.
-KEVIN MCGRATH, Poet Laureate, Harvard University
In the ‘Abstract Oralism’, Yamini reveals the beguiling mythic and mimetic history of the dangerously luminous, sensuous, and ephemeral beauty of the desert of Rann of Kachchh leaving us astonished and redeemed at once. ‘Sifting through soiled pages of an anti-modern, abridged dictionary’ of memories, she weaves embroidered tales of palaeolithic biographies of forgotten people in an experimental genre of speech-therapy with fierce emotional power. By turns poignant, playful and ironic, Yamini’s deceptively layered linguistic dreamscapes break new ground in experiencing hallucinatory minimalism in poetry. A mesmerizing debut!
-ASHWANI KUMAR, Poet, Writer and Public Policy Researcher
Related products
-
Unmappable Moves
$20About the Book
Reading Unmappable Moves, I had the strangest sensation of time expanding and closing in. These are taut, enigmatic poems—lightning flashes with bright, insistent heartbeats.—TISHANI DOSHILethal tales of sex and death that left me pining for more of Sampurna Chattarji’s mysterious lyric inventions.—JEET THAYIL -
Life on a Bridge
$30About the Book
The essays and transcripts of Dilip Chitre brought together here are valuable in themselves as they offer a commentary on the Indian sense of tradition and the contemporary attitudes to literature. Every piece is of interest in itself. But, their greater worth lies in that they articulate the perspective of one of our most admirable poets on many issues that mattered to him. Taken together, they provide a basis for fathoming his poetry and should help us in making a more nuanced sense of it. Chitre was a fascinating poet, but it is not possible to say that his poetry was easily accessible to most of his readers. Like W. B. Yeats, he weaves in his poems experiences that arise in a given moment (such as the felling of a tree in his father’s house) together with many layers of timeless human quests and anxieties. He brings together silence and euphoria in an imagistic mix that is difficult to name with any precision. It is hence that this
volume of his comments, essays, lectures and other texts should be of importance for the lovers of Dilip Chitre’s literary works.– Ganesh N Devy
-
Bewilderness
$30About the Book
Devashish Makhija’s Bewilderness announces its visceral bridging of self and nature in its title. The baffling challenges are outside the self, coming at the self as a profusion of stimuli from the mega-city, nature’s receding kingdom, and the horrors of the political. But they are inside the self too, as it fashions itself from fragments of childhood memory, responses to paintings that hold out inspiration, and empathetic connections forged with vulnerable Others in predicaments of distress. These poems bear resonant witness to the age in which they are written – an age governed by the call of the siren and the insistence of the curfew, the militarization of civil life and the degradation of rivers and mountains. Bewilderness captivates us with its vividly palpable images, its exhilarating shifts of tempo, and its plangent, deeply moving tonality.
– Ranjit Hoskote
-
Two and a Half
$16About the Book
Yogesh Patel's poems in "2½" are “sparks of fire”, igniting language into flames of inspiration in a world that fails us, but only if we permit it. Patel magnifies the
humanitarian failures in our world society with poetry of vision that is at once daring and profoundly humane. These are tales of hopes…and lost dreams, rising out of the simmering ash of society's arrested conscience, into the healing blaze of universal truths. One cannot fail to be inspired by the power of compassion in these poems.
– James Ragan, author of ‘The Hunger Wall’ and ‘The Chanter’s Reed’ and
recipient of a Poetry Society of America citation and Swan Foundation Humanitarian
Award==============
These poems are filled with recurring potent images of place and personal histories which successfully invite the reader into intimate spaces. Those spaces include everything from socks to shaving brush but also bravely address disturbing and distressing subject matter. The violence at the heart of this collection is never expressed directly but infuses the poetry, so that the reader is left shaken and thoughtful.
– Maura Dooley, Judge’s comment, Aryamati Prize 2023
-
Variations on Silence
$16About the Book
Throughout Variations on Silence, Nadia Mifsud draws us into intimate scenes and gestures,
as if overhearing lovers mid-conversation. The central figure – almost mythic in scale – is
silence itself, which Mifsud imbues with weight, texture, physical presence. Silence shelters,
stirs, shakes, unwinds, “tastes / of red soil and conifer.” Miriam Calleja’s translation conveys
the ache and longing of that silence with a sensual clarity rare in English. A fabulous book.
– John Wall Barger, The Elephant of SilenceAs Dante said, love is what moves the sun and the other stars – but it is also what flows
through all things, binding them together. This is what breathes in the silences – namely, in
the poems – of Nadia Mifsud : a listening rooted in love, which through love transforms and
reintegrates lovers into the cosmos, restoring the world to something deeply connected to
our humanity. Calleja’s admirable translation – herself a poet – captures this dynamic with
striking clarity and preserves it as the central energy of the work. The encounter between
these two poets ultimately offers us a book of poetry, not merely a book of poems – I repeat:
a cohesive and coherent work, held together by a vision both profound and vast. Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, Rilke’s Duino Elegies… The poetry found in this book is capable of
traversing time and resisting it, of crossing space to bind us – irrevocably – to this cosmos,
and in that bond, to reveal the secret of life.– Pietro Federico, Most of the Stars
Every verb in Nadia Mifsud's work shimmers, echoes, and rappels down the cliffside of a
stanza. Valences expand through repetition; "waves like jaws" locate the oceanic motion. One physically hears and feels the island of Malta in the tension between the isolation,
refrain, and the sea returning to shore, empty-handed. Miriam Calleja's attentive translation brings these affects and "sea-scented places" into English without forsaking the resonances and echoes of "cockleshells" past. Variations on Silence touches the hem where displacement circles the idea of place and results in lyric. The mode is modern; the echoes are ancient; the book is irresistible.– Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies
-
Folie Á Deux
$18About the Book
Jennifer Robertson’s first book of poems, Folie à Deux, introduces us to an assured and sophisticated new voice in the world of Anglophone poetry in India. Robertson celebrates the sensuousness, the warm flesh of language. Her poems sharpen our awareness of things viscerally experienced, our memories of things held and cherished, our desire to secure forever the ephemeral yet compelling images of photography and cinema. In her handling, the resonance of the breath crafted into sound takes concrete occupancy of its environment, becomes a percussive force; she writes: “I wonder about sound invading space, wounding, astounding space and stories rising like a Phoenix.”
Here is a poet who captivates us, enchants us into spaces that “have two doors and no exit”.
– Ranjit Hoskote, author of Jonahwhale
Jennifer Robertson’s poems invite us to a world of “intimate strangeness” where poetry is “nuts and waywardness” and poets are “hoodlums” who leave behind “delinquencies” as their legacy. Although thickly silted with references to literature, painting and cinema, this is not a world of glibness or slick cultural sophistication. A throbbing vein of disquiet runs through Folie à Deux reminding us of relationships that could lean towards “darkness and magic”; lives lived in “intermission” with fragments spilling over “in the dark, under the seat”; and a self that yearns to drown into “a sunken civilisation”. This is a poetry of crafted surfaces and unexpected trenches, beeping microwaves and buried cities – allusive and “alluvial” all at once. Folie à Deux is a strong, self-assured début.
– Arundhathi Subramaniam, author of Wild Women
Lexically restless, geodesic, and unapologetically omnivorous, Jennifer Robertson’s Folie à Deux is a dialectic that considers the fulcra of observance and animacy, liberation and stagnancy, tranquility and obsession. Robertson’s poetry applies a painterly heat to our bodies, and readers to scratch at persona, and to map a self through the historical detritus of art and signs. What disturbs me most about this book is that, ravenously, Robertson “reinvents time travel”.
– Jhani Randhawa, author of Time Regime
-
CogVerse
$20About the Book
Vivekanand Selvaraj’s debut book of poems, ‘Cog Verse’ has clever cogs that rotate and fit snugly into the amiable cog machine in succinct poetry. His prose poetry dealing with the internal life of a freshman and the business of medicine as a profession is unflinchingly incisive. Speaking of his ancestors and grandparents on both sides, nowhere does he forget his Tamil ethos and the book comes off as startlingly original.
— Sivakami Velliangiri
_____________________
Here, in these poems, the object-worlds of a pre-liberalized India rub shoulders with the pandemic present, incongruent, yet strangely essential. Here, failure is rebellion, and rebellion in itself, becomes an illusion. Yet, Selvaraj’s poems document a severe critique of the institutions we hold as pristine – the medical school, the hospital, the deep state. Oftentimes, this critique is that of an insider, who, in spite of the said critique, feels depleted, hopeless, leaving us – the readers – asking for more. And, it is often done through careful manipulation of the white spaces on a page, unconventional line-break and a playful engagement with the very idea of lyric subjectivity.
— Nandini Dhar
___________________
Vivekanand is a poet of spaces. He isn’t interested in the broader themes of things that happen every day. But he is still interested in the façade of equanimity, everyday cruelty, and mundanity. These poems are Vivekanand’s way of chronicling stories for posterity, but also because everyone else has simply forgotten to catalogue them. These aren’t poems you’ve read before. Vivekanand isn’t a poet you’ve met before. Unique in his writing and assured in his voice, Vivekanand’s CogVerse is a necessary addition to your poetry collection.
—- Manjiri Indurkar
