Full Description
Arundhathi Subramaniam's poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women - women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down. Leaping from the past into a global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain one's spine through life's giddiest rollercoaster rides. Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to 'gatecrash into the present', how to 'go skinny-dipping in the self'. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom. Arundhathi Subramaniam has published five collections in India and three books with Bloodaxe in the UK including When God Is a Traveller (2014), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Love Without a Story (2020). Her earlier work is available in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009). She has published other books on Buddhism and spiritual figures.
Contents
9 Author's note
Cycling Hands Free on Air
15 The World Takes a Breath
17 Staying Unnamed
19 The Marketplace of Poets
21 The Breaking News Lullaby
24 Masks Off
26 The Great Mother
28 Grant a Woman Her Fifties
30 This Fruit
32 The Hand
34 The World Breaks
36 And Suddenly It's Evening
38 The Tailor
40 The Women No Longer Wait
43 Another Way to Stop Waiting
45 What Stories are Left
47 Patachara Awakens
The Gallery of Upside Down Women
53 That Girl from Karaikkal
56 The Truth-speaker's Word Doesn't Change
59 Where the Yoginis Wear No Heads
62 Questions for Akka Mahadevi
64 Unstained by White
68 The Maker of Indigo Poems
God's Forgotten Nickname
75 The Idol Worshipper's Song
76 The Idolater's Way
78 God's Forgotten Nickname
81 Nothing Is Singular
83 What Do You Do with the Moon in Urdu Poetry?
86 Just in Case
87 Forgiving Teachers
89 Some Names Take Time
92 The Dog in the Manhattan Elevator
94 Some Said He Looked Like James Dean
96 When Two Women Drink Chai Together
98 Consecration
100 Tips for Growing Up
104 The Crone
106 Creation Story
111 Acknowledgements
