Showing all 9 results

  • Midnight Verbs

    About the Book

    “What used to be borders is now you,” writes Marko Pogačar in this beautiful, inimitable
    collection of poems, giving us a world of post-war Yugoslavia where “TV shows start with
    familiar scenes.” What is the poet to do in this world? The poet demands the “green skull of
    an apple.” It is a world where eggs chirp, newspapers rustle, and the dead are near. What is it,
    this syntax of seeing one's country with full honesty, without any lyric filters? How does it
    become so dazzlingly lyrical, nevertheless? “I dislike walking on a person's left side,” the
    poet admits. “I shove the night into an evil e-mail / and send it to the entire nation.” And
    behind him we see the world, “beautiful, like a burning guillotine.” It is blessed, this
    strangeness of abandon, after all is lost. And yet, not all is lost. What is happening here? Real
    poetry is happening. Lyric fire. I know it when instead of writing a comment on the book, I
    just want to keep quoting. For poetry is a mystery that is communicated before it is
    understood. Marko Pogačar is the real thing, and I am especially grateful to Andrea Jurjević
    for these crisp, beautiful translations.
    —Ilya Kaminsky
    History is a constant and defining character in poetry where the most memorable lines
    brilliantly combine dark, dry humor with a direct treatment of the physical. There we
    discover a mad desire for laughter. For reckoning with rules. With borders. With God. Marko
    Pogačar is a poet of expressive power and specificity. Almost every poem is intense and
    scandalous, dejected and intelligent, or a poetic whirlwind of all of the above that’s not to be
    messed with.
    —Claudiu Komartin
    Pogačar's poetry is original, layered, equivocal, and rich in references. Like Brodsky, Pogačar
    turns to history, but his associations are more reminiscent of John Ashbery and the delightful
    strangeness of Tomaž Šalamun.
    —Martín López-Vega

    Marko Pogačar crafts rich, lush poems in a more consistent and refreshing manner than other
    poets. His poetry is filled with images that are tough to visualize. His use of language is
    rarely referential; it's more in the service of creating linguistic realities, those that exist only in words. Pogačar seems to be constantly testing the ability of language to create worlds.
    — Irena Matijašević

    $18
  • The Compass Bird

    About the Book

    Observant and meditative, lit with gentle whimsy, Siddhartha Menon’s work on the animal world leads us from ornithology to ontology, detail to dazzling insight, in a wingbeat. Here is a book in which the reverie of snails, the ‘mynahness’ of mynahs, the unhurried gaze of nilgai, becomes a way to reflect on all the eternal questions—time, belonging, love, purpose, a world ‘stained with stillness’, in which ‘those who attend have the last word’. One of the most delightful new books of poetry I have read this year.

    – Arundhathi Subramaniam

     

    $15
  • All That I Wanna Do (Marathi)

    About the Book

    Dear Sanjeev,
    I read your poem yesterday ( last evening). Globalisation, and the consequent private Americanisation, corporatisation, computers, mobiles, mall culture and the decline of humanity
    in every aspect of life is your concern, and mine too. That you and I have felt that comes with this new kind of life, and the regret that we feel because we cannot deter this decline or escape from it, the sarcastic presentation of the never-ending story of our contemporary miseries appear in your in the poem one after another; and interestingly (your) style neither accepts any poetic form nor it is written in any poetic language, and just as you were exhausted while carving a new definition of poetry, I was exhausted while reading your poem – this is what precisely I want to tell you by writing this exhausting second sentence. What you have expressed in this poem is the philosophy of this new way of life. Of course, I think it's significant that while presenting this philosophy afresh, you haven’t pretended that you are a philosopher!
    Yours
    Hemant Divate
    August 28, 2004

    $16
  • All that I Wanna Do (English)

    About Book

    Dear Sanjeev

    I read your poem yesterday ( last evening). Globalisation, and the consequent private Americanisation, corporatisation, computers, mobiles, mall culture and the decline of humanity in every aspect of life is your concern, and mine too.

    That you and I have felt that comes with this new kind of life, and the regret that we feel because we cannot deter this decline or escape from it, the sarcastic presentation of the never-ending story of our contemporary miseries appear in your in the poem one after another; and interestingly (your)  style neither accepts any poetic form nor it is written in any poetic language, and just as you were exhausted while carving a new definition of poetry, I was exhausted while reading your poem – this is what precisely I want to tell you by writing this exhausting second sentence.

    What you have expressed in this poem is the philosophy of this new way of life.

    Of course, I think it’s significant that while presenting this philosophy afresh, you haven’t pretended that you are a philosopher!

    Yours

    Hemant Divate

    August 28, 2004

    $16
  • Forty Five Shades of Brown

    About the Book

    Babitha Marina Justin’s poems, woven around self, nature, and body, have an organic architecture, gothic or temple-like,  with metaphors working like sculpted images or murals around a central experience. They are honest, at times confessional, often with memories from childhood and adolescence for their raw materials; but they do not shy away from natural calamities and existential crises. Babitha's poems are at once deeply Indian and instinctively feminine in their deployment of images and the organization of experiences.
    – K Satchidanandan

    Babitha Marina Justin has a distinct voice that is passionately lyrical and personal to the point of abandon, and in these COVID times, poetry too has also taken a Corona-Shaped turn. Her world is not only herself, but her neighbourhood, and the larger country which she peppers with a persistent historical awareness, of the Muziris and the Jews. She celebrates their joys and mourns the murky, screaming out the lurking fury in her unique verses.
    – Sivakami Velliangiri

    $16
  • Unmappable Moves

    About 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 DOSHI
     Lethal tales of sex and death that left me pining for more of Sampurna Chattarji’s mysterious lyric inventions.
    —JEET THAYIL
    $20