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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
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Midnight Verbs
$18About 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-VegaMarko 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 -
The Compass Bird
$15About 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
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All That I Wanna Do (Marathi)
$16About 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 -
UNLIKELY JOURNEY
$12About 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.
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Vital Signs
$16About The Book
What happens when you pay attention to which foot leads – when you walk? Or when we really attend to the pleasures of eating, or of a changing sky? What if we realised that paradise is found all around us – Shangri La behind bus stops?
Amlanjyoti Goswami’s poetry is full of these Vital Signs, these details of wonder. Stringing words on a high wire, his is a rare ability to pause time, so we can look, really look, and live. Even the act of repairing a shoe can be meditative and philosophical in his hands. And within the glimpses of grand ideas there is a humility, a reminder that life is there to be felt, touched, lived, in the quietest of moments.
The laureate of ‘the idea of forever, inside an instant’, Amlan’s poetry carries within it, that most unfashionable of qualities – a sense of grace – but also the quiet wisdom that a life is a series of sensations that become memories. He shows us how the mythic can be ordinary, and how the ordinary becomes mythic. –Rishi Dastidar
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Abstract Oralism
$20About 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
