The Cosmonaut in Herge’s Rocket

‘In this collection, Arjun Rajendran is unapologetically cosmopolitan, yet rooted in the gritty’

Realities of Indian city streets and our ghostly middle-class parlours, Rajendran’s poems excel in the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements, geographies, texts and tropes. Yet it is in these juxtapositions that Rajendran finds both the rhythm of a dirge that would mourn our broken contemporaneity, and celebrations of small moments of solidarity and creativity. With this collection, Rajendran provides a definitive push to the very idea of contemporary Indian English poetry.’ -Nandini Dhar, Author of ‘Historians of Redundant Moments’

Arjun Rajendran’s Cosmonaut in Herges Rocket never fails to surprise and provide something new. So many times, these poems stopped me in my tracks, holding my breath. The poems here create a world: we are given Anna Karenina and the stickers on a Rubik’s Cube, Archie Andrews and the death of a hedgehog, a lost (and found) copy of Lolita and the Bible described as ‘the oldest bestseller about hell.’ All of these -and much more – are made new again, brought into connection with each other to form new constellations from the world we thought we recognized’. -Jennifer Finstrom, Poetry Editor, Eclectica Magazine

“Arjun Rajendran’s poetry mixes the scientific, the symbolic, and the speculative. One poem includes the Dyson sphere, another has a superstitious mother who has quit eating mangoes; one poem talks of a friend coming out, another plays on the Hardy-Ramanujan number. But the unique guile of this poet comes through when all of this happens together. Such that a poem of nostalgia mutates into one about global warming; such that a poem arrives at a longing for comics through the wild route of space travel. One reads Rajendran’s poems with the warm knowledge that he is a poet who can do anything. He is my favourite contemporary poet, and definitely one of India’s finest.’ – Tanuj Solanki, Author of ‘Neon Noon’