Showing all 19 results

  • 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
  • Obsessed with Life

    About the Book

    “Mozetič’s verse conjures a distinctly gay way of looking at the world. It is both placid and paranoid, opening the world into paper-thin layers of sex, loneness and non-disingenuous self-reflection. His lyric has a remarkable flow, his language is persuasively simple, and his tone is forthright, all of which give the shattered heart at the core of this book a strange magnetic force.”

        – Akhil Katyal, poet, translator, scholar and queer activist

    $10
  • Salt & Pepper

    About the Book

    Salt and Pepper, Sukrita’s selected poems, present an eloquent, word-induced
    silence articulated with remarkable ease. In the centre of the
    multisensory, reflective silence dwells memory that pesters and heals, and
    shapes a deeper understanding of self and existence, taking one beyond the
    mere unmasking of a past. What adds luminosity to Sukrita’s densely textured
    poems is the layered and fluid exploration of life experience, without any sense
    of closure or finality. — Shafey Kidwai

    —-

    Words are not just words, there is a long journey of emotion, thought and
    experience behind them with which Sukrita weaves the weft and the warp of her
    poems in shades of Salt and Pepper.— Nirupama Dutt


    Girija Sharma: Silence emerges in these poems as a powerful metaphor in the interplay of
    images which are impressionistic, symbolic and existential all at once. All noise is cancelled
    –what remain are words in the purest form building a symphony of silence.


    —-

    Madhavi Apte: Sukrita’s poems are on the one hand illusive and on the other potent like her
    own modern, abstract paintings. Most poems combine the elements of a mystique, the erotic
    and the emotional, personal and impersonal. The poems are grounded and yet ethereal.
    Basudhara Roy : Many-layered, teasing in its apparent simplicity, and haunting in its
    profundity…Animated by her painter’s consciousness, Sukrita’s images are terse, pictorial
    and at the same time, both concrete and abstract.
    The compression, precision, lightness and luminosity of these poems is undeniable. There is,
    in them, a simplicity, intensity and finesse that characterizes classical Eastern forms like the
    haiku and the tanka.

    —–
    Shyista Khan: the poems reflect an unmediated subjectivity… The
    poetic consciousness borders between self-effacement and self
    assertion….

    $20
  • The Ruined Millionaire: New Selected Poems 2002–2022

    About the Book

    “Mazer, along with his northeastern companions Nikolayev and Kapovich – of the further norths and further easts – make jubilant singing verse as they step through the western wreckage. This must be remembered, say the only poets who’ll matter, so I must write in the ways of memory.” — Glyn Maxwell, from the Preface

    “These poems are like trees that contain and protect and conceal themselves from themselves. Each wears a rough coat over the sap, the heart, the rainwater and scars. In so many ways the bark of a tree is a scroll with its messages written out of and into its experience. Mazer’s poems know they are beautiful the way the wooden rills on a tree are elegant, made of history, of romance and pride.” — Fanny Howe

    “Ben Mazer is a true inheritor of John Ashbery’s legacy, specifically the Ashbery of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Like that classic of American poetry, The Ruined Millionaire ironically also suits the contemporary European scene. In translation, Mazer’s new selected poems could just as easily fit on a shelf of the best contemporary Polish or French poetry. Anglophone readers are lucky to have them available to us first.” — John Hennessy

    “When Shakespeare meets Ben Mazer at the Mermaid Tavern he will hand Ben this book. ‘Shakespherian’ the Bard will say. ‘And more.’ Another poet at the end of the bar will nod and remark ‘There are No Dry Salvages there.’ Then Will will read ‘Monsieur Barbary Brecht’ to all and they will all be surprised by joy. You will be too when you read these poems: matchless, immortal, and, like all great poetry, unexplainable.” — Joe Green

    “‘Start with the rain’: there is a great deal of rain in Ben Mazer’s poetry, often in darkness and whipped by wind. One might speak of a poetic of the torrential, given the irresistible forward sweep of his poems as they move through overlapping territories of memory and history and dream. He advances through the damp corridors of a foundered world, in which the debris (and the vocabulary and the contentions) of centuries has piled up, and the voices of poets and movie actors and a multitude of others re-echo like displaced wraiths. There are constant surprises—cascades of rhyme and apparitions from a history become ghostly, like ‘Caligari, tortured in oblong angles, / beer garden, mental institute, who mangles / memory’—but no matter how allusive or wildly improvisational, no matter how extraordinarily profuse in their range of reference, the lines are never digressive. The past woven into their ‘deep syntax / of auditory visuality’ is a living past: they exist in an urgent present, whether ‘driving thus into the heart of pain’ or momentarily perceiving Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the last reel of Top Hat, ‘looming and large as any of the designs of God.’ Whatever elements become part of this poetry are distilled with sustained intensity into one substance, a music appropriate to ‘that hour / when memory settles / on the evening / darkness its liquid / history of masks.'” — Geoffrey O’Brien

    “‘In a soup you never know / what you’ll run into next. All the ingredients repeat, / but you encounter some of them for the first time.’ This is the savory gumbo out of which Ben Mazer has made his poems. At times maddeningly elliptical, at times this ‘ellipticality’ is what moves or tickles or interests you most. The editor of Delmore Schwartz, Hart Crane, and John Crowe Ransom (among others) is himself a poet very much worth savoring.” — Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems.

    “What we can’t think to say, what we don’t know how to say, whether of experience cosmic or minute, he says. The white picket fence that is always intense, the little house between the two big ones, what a movie is. His comparisons are wildly accurate but they aren’t really comparisons at all. They come from similar and related as easily as far away and disparate places or thoughts, which is remarkable for its multidimensionality of seeing. His metaphors are never arbitrary or half convincing, but come from the unconscious. And the sounds fit the sense—there are lines to rival Yeats. And he can sustain a long poem without lagging. Only one who feels every nuance, who suffers intense emotions could write such great poems.” — Ruth Lepson

    “The year’s most essential book of poetry.” — Michael Londra in SpoKe

    $5
  • 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
  • UNLIKELY JOURNEY

    About the Book

    As happens on all trips, in the pages of this book we find unforeseen questions and unexpected landscapes. These verses are transparent because they speak to us not about what is intuited or remembered but what is seen while trying to establish order, specify limits, and vanquish shadows.

    $12
  • Where Is the Mouth of That Word?

    About the Book

    I breathed. I looked up. I saw her standing in the line of fire, “simply standing/on the last line of
    this page”, asking, as she looked me in the eye, “Where are you reading from?”

    And that, dear readers, who are about to encounter Maryam’s poems for the first time, is the
    question.
    You can Google her, you can hear her speak 1 , you can explore her intersecting engagements as an essayist, translator, and academic.
    But first, you can find her here, as I did, in a selection of her poems – from early to later, from the spoken word to the “vocal infection of the page”, from rant to reflection, plea to command.
    You could, in obeyance, “Turn the page, and leave!”
    You could be sentenced
    to an expired word:
    (Silence)

    You could hear the tanin (echo) of Sepehri’s hich (nothingness) reverberating at the same frequency with which you see Dali’s ‘The Echo of the Void’ hovering in your line of vision.
    You could, and you will.
    For now, all that matters is knowing (asking!) where you read from.
    And as for the title we eventually chose – where is the mouth of that word?
    Wherever there is one – fearless enough to speak it.

    – Sampurna Chattarji

     

    $16
  • Lighthouse for drowning memories

    About the Book

    It’s in Delhi, dystopian as ever, that Sujatha Mathai continues to live and write today, and I fear her words—“I cannot save my city / Against the degradation of dust”—will echo long into the future, acquiring new meanings.  And yet I’m so happy to read a new book of hers, to see that she’s still writing her poems sharp and clear as glass, full of sympathy for the world and those who suffer.  It makes me feel that literature survives and helps us survive, that it carries more continuity than we think.

    Vivek Narayanan
    Assistant Professor, Department of English, George Mason University

    $16
  • Stray Poems

    About the Book

    Abhay K. strikes such a cheerful, sensual and sunny note in so many of his individual poems…with a pure, ringing sound and rhythm all of his own.

    —Gabriel Rosenstock, Poet, Ireland

     

    Abhay K. is a trusted guide to modern poetry, to the journey in which we are seeking truth, peace and justice…feel the spirit of God coursing through his lines.

    —Indran Amirthanayagam, Poet, USA

    About the Book

    Stray Poems takes you on a poetic ride across the world, to the moon and planets in our Solar System and to the far reaches of the Universe and then back to our glorious Earth! Bon Voyage!

    $20