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Grab your heart & follow me
$4About the Book
“In my wonderland, there are only beginnings, ‘there is no end’. Plunge into this book of?poems by Claus Ankersen where cat-gods rule, babies are born with stargates for eyes, kisses are catalogued and the 12th pen writes of celebratory sins. Expand the eternity of now. Be nomad, tiger, ‘soulhuntress.’ Head-dive into the mysteries of the world. Dance
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Frazil
$16About the Book
Menka Shivdasani’s poetry is both original and strikingly unusual, not just her tangential way of putting things across, but also how thought process and imagination run away with the poem, and make it exciting. An experience is translated into another experience and then gets mixed with fancy in a juice blender. Chopping lettuce, she’ll be assailed by visions—burning bride, politician, a ‘wounded Hiroshima’, and finally a finger-chopping Nazi. A poem about separation will end with her handling ‘alien porcelain’ at a tea party. For over three decades the excitement she brings to her fine poetry has never deserted her.
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Elsewhere Where Else
$20About the Book
Sampurna Chattarji and Eurig Salisbury are two of the ten poets from India and Wales who took part in a project organized by Literature Across Frontiers and partners to mark the 70th anniversary of independent India. The poets collaborated to create new work and translate each other into their respective languages during a series of residencies in both countries, alternating between the hustle and bustle of Indian metropolises and the peace and quiet of welsh towns and rural locations. The project addressed, in a myriad ways, the theme of ?independence?. In artistic practice, independence means freedom to think, act and create beyond the confines of convention and economic necessity. But successful independence-of communities and individuals alike-also involves co-independence, collaboration and understanding across divides and differences. At a time of global change which sees increasing friction between identities, we hope this project has helped to open up a unique dialogue and formulate new narratives and ideas which both uncover and move beyond histories.
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159
$3About the Book
Nabanita Kanungo’s collection is simultaneously an elegy and a victory song. A documentation of the heartbreaks that have plagued our subcontinent for the past century or so, her poems re-define the lyric form, chronicling the unfolding of a personal self framed by larger political events. Here, history appears as a long, continuous saga of violence, in which Partition memories remain juxtaposed within the everyday lived realities and violences of neoliberal Indian cities. With this collection, Kanungo provides a ghostly account of quotidian survival?stories that remain forever out of official histories?and re-defines the meaning of Anglophone India political poetry of contemporary times.Nabanita Kanungo’s poems ache with an awareness of how poetry cannot truly evoke anything but absence, of how ‘It rains and words say nothing’; ‘Only memory is green’. In this tragedy, Kanungo finds the only solace available to the poet: a luminous quality in the every day, the ‘Mirror where things are simply written with light’. These poems work in the liminal spaces of the world and of the self, between the present moment and its turning into memory, between words and rain.
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Durable Transit
$22About the Book
Ravi Shankar’s poems are immortal in the flesh, finding in The life of the mind its interpretations, its instrumentality. The surpassing, transient, lyrical moment; and in the life of the World’s body the permanent, unflinching presence of thought, Unconfined by time and space. They are the verbal artifacts of a Singular, many-sided, and distinguished consciousness.Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri Engorged with image, thick, viscous and churning, Ravi Shankar’s Poems have the density of mercury as well as its fluidity and Mobility…The energy is visceral. The language is restless, hungry For surprise, the register swinging between the formal and the Demotic (both American and Indian). Underlying this is an Almost voluptuous need to embrace myth, history, metaphysics And pop culture, and bring all of it into a single book, and Sometimes a single poem. This is matched by an alertness to form with references ranging from the Bop to the pada — making for A playful, stylistically supple poetry. – Arundhathi Subramaniam Ravi Shankar’s poems have a fine-tuned sense of form, a rare Delight in language. Through wit and abstraction, they reveal a Metaphysics of longing, binding us to the elements of our moving World. – Meena Alexander
Ravi Shankar is truly, now, one of America’s finest younger poets.-Dick Allen
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COLLECTED POEMS
$60About the Book
?Mahapatra?s is an elite art, aimed at a small, discriminating readership.?- Bruce King
Jayanta Mahapatra is indisputably the most innovative, progressive and Anglophile poets of modern India. He is intrinsically touched by the stark realities of our country, and writes instinctively about ? hunger, myths, traditions, customs, rituals, love, passion, anger, frustration, sex, the self and the eternity, the socio-cultural diversity with adroitness. His extant work exudes post ?colonial leanings and spirit invariably. Post- colonialism refers to those theories in texts, political aspirations and modes of activism that spur to challenge structural inequalities and to establish social justice. Mahapatra?s poetry unravels many facets of post- colonialism as haunting past, search for identity and roots. Mahapatra writes to enliven the native tradition protesting the former colonizers and establishing national identity and integrity. He evokes the sense of Indianness both in content and form through his poetry relentlessly. His symbols and images are, however, evocative, suggestive and pivotal for linguistic versatility.- Mirza Sibtain Beg
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COLLECTED POEMS
$60About the Book
?Mahapatra?s is an elite art, aimed at a small, discriminating readership.?- Bruce King
Jayanta Mahapatra is indisputably the most innovative, progressive and Anglophile poets of modern India. He is intrinsically touched by the stark realities of our country, and writes instinctively about ? hunger, myths, traditions, customs, rituals, love, passion, anger, frustration, sex, the self and the eternity, the socio-cultural diversity with adroitness. His extant work exudes post ?colonial leanings and spirit invariably. Post- colonialism refers to those theories in texts, political aspirations and modes of activism that spur to challenge structural inequalities and to establish social justice. Mahapatra?s poetry unravels many facets of post- colonialism as haunting past, search for identity and roots. Mahapatra writes to enliven the native tradition protesting the former colonizers and establishing national identity and integrity. He evokes the sense of Indianness both in content and form through his poetry relentlessly. His symbols and images are, however, evocative, suggestive and pivotal for linguistic versatility.- Mirza Sibtain Beg
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The Metaphysics of the Tree-Frog’s Silence
$12About the Book
It is our loss that we did not know Ajithan Kurup’s work when he was alive, and we did not celebrate his brave and lonely project: to render the unsayable into language. He cannot be imitated or replaced, only admired.- Jeet Thayil
To enter Ajithan G. Kurup’s poetic world is to risk, in the words of his title poem, dancing “headlong down precipices.” It’s rare to find a contemporary poet who dares near-unattainable heights and fearful depths on dancing words – words that may sometimes seem far-fetched or invented but which, in fact, are inspired variants or archaic forms of those more usually used: “sempstress” instead of “seamstress”, “enow” instead of “enough”, “trode” instead of “trod”.-ADIL JUSSAWALLA
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Cyborg Proverbs
$12Das’ poetry more than delivers on the promise made in the penultimate lines of her titular Cyborg Proverbs, offering its reader the gift of penetrating (in)sight through thoughts “as precise as suspicion”. Her syllables breathe aloud, like hushes that unassumingly gasp in the gaps between echoes, in the interstitial moments of alighting bird wings, or roots that braid the air, or the slipperiness of netted fish, and the gush of rain as it nestles its way into the crevices of walls and swells its way through its parasitical, residential act.
Das exquisitely reimagines syntax and her frequently anthropomorphic poems shape-shift upon each ensuing page, making Cyborg Proverbs an enviable feat, aided in no small measure by her studied, patient, bird-watcher gaze and her unspeakable lust for articulating the tacitly sensual.
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Banaras And The Other
$14About the Book
Ashwani Kumar’s poems in ‘Banaras and The Other” are a mischievous irreverence turned at times to the present and at times to the past. The personal and the political, memories and nostalgia, mythical characters and contemporary parodies mix and mingle in these poems in diverse proportions to produce a rare poetic energy that belongs entirely to our times of pain and paradox. –K. Satchidanandan
Ashwani Kumar’s Banaras and the Other captivates us as a delightful romp through myth, folklore and history. Read past the revelry, however, and you will see that it engages passionately and provocatively with the fissured, schismatic scenarios of 21st century India.–Ranjit Hoskote
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Last-Ditch Ecstasy
$14About the Book
Adrian Grima in collaboration with his talented and unusually resourceful translator, Albert Gatt – has produced a rich and memorable compilation of poems. Their geographical and emotional stew is international in its flavours yet always Maltese in its complex marinations. Grima succeeds in being – and these are potent combinations – both lyrical and true-to-life, both tender and unblinking, both comforting and challenging. His collection is a thought-provoking joy.- Jim Crace
How can the soul survive the world’s brutality. This is the essential, unanswerable question that Adrian Grima asks in and through his poems, beautifully translated from the Maltese by Albert Gatt. Taut with unexpected collusions, the poems walk the tightrope tensions of time and space. Turmoil, both emotional and political, is contained within the ascetic rigour of the lines; the mysteries of the distant are brought closer through eyes and lips, taste and touch. In Grima’s world, a lull can be as keen as a knife, blood can be the ultimate betrayal. An arterial anxiety courses through his work. Between “thistle and sun”, between skin and skin, between “departure and return”, the poet repeatedly alerts us to the heart-breaking fragility of the body, besieged. Coexistent with his bruising awareness of damage is his faith in contact, in simple human pleasures, a conversation, a pot of flowers, a meal. Deeply intelligent and moving, here is a book with “sky in its wings, migration in its heart”. Read it, be shattered, then soar.- Sampurna Chattarji
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The Cosmonaut in Herge’s Rocket
$3‘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’
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Scripted in the Streams
$12About the Books
There is an intense humanity in these poems by Rati Saxena, a humanity that ennobles all of us who are humble enough to listen. There is an empathy is these poems for all living things – for the spider, for the ant, for the owl – and a similar understanding of all things that may not be alive. -Alan Titley, Professor Emeritus of Modern Irish, University College, Cork It has travelled a long, long way this voice?and we welcome it as we would do a stranger, into the West where despair, decline and decay are seemingly permanent lodgers, Saxena’s lyrics arrive like a fresh breeze. New-born, fresh and smelling of the earth, her poems draw on the well of Indo-European tradition, the intimate links that bind the female psyche and the landscape in all its fecundity. -Dr Michel h’Aodha, University of Limerick Saxena allows for different aeons to melt into each other. She creates a world in which humans interact with insects and animals. We are all of and from the same source. The image of the snake is a powerful one to explain the frustrations of modern women in today’s India. Her vision makes a mockery of the boundaries around our lives and we sail with her through a magical world, coming into contact with the source of life itself. There are echoes of Flann O’ Brien in the delightful poem about the bicycle of her youth. Taboos and rituals will not enslave her and poetry finds its way into the washing on the line and the fire that bakes our daily bread. – Ceaiti Ni Bheildiuin, poet In this selection of the poems of Rati Saxena we are drawn into a world of imagery where deep respect is shown for the low -Brian O Conchubhair, University of Notre Dame, USA
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Sound Odyssey
$16About the Book
Gabor Lanczkor’s poems represent a uniquely unfledged, intriguing way of approaching artistic traditions and geographies; contemporary and ancient, human and non-human. The Hungarian poet’s themes range from psychedelic prosody of love and darkling austerity of re-imagined Greek myths to the wildly unconventional literary re-creation of intimate vision of the Indo-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil and the Spanish Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings. American poet and essayist Jeremy Faro and prominent Indian translators and poets Rita Malhotra, Terry Verma and Ashwani Kumar have collaborated on this English anthology of Lanczkor’s poems.
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Walk Like Monsters
$12About the Book
These are late night poems of the body that sing also of catastrophe, how wide it is, how easy, like ‘being in one place instead of another.’ Anindita Sengupta’s new book is hot, harrowing and masterful. It will stay with me for a long time. ~ Jeet Thayil Anindita Sengupta is a poet of the precise line, the measured image, of mediated passion, the sure ending. Her observation is acute, her politics seldom theatrical and her passage from one world to another and from the object to the spirit smooth and subtle. Her poetry proves that silk can wound and knife can flower. ~ K. Satchidanandan “They rise in this landscape, the ancients – old loves, myths, cities, secret revolutions. Anindita Sengupta’s language is forever old and forever new. Fretful, explosive, terrifying. Her poetry will leave you with beautiful scars.” ~ Janice Pariat
