Full Description
Winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Mona Arshi's debut collection, 'Small Hands', introduces a brilliant and compelling new voice. At the centre of the book is the slow detonation of grief after her brother's death but her work focuses on the whole variety of human experience: pleasure, hardship, tradition, energised by language which is in turn both tender and risky. Often startling as well as lyrical, Arshi's poems resist fixity; there is a gentle poignancy at work here which haunt many of the poems. This is humane poetry. Arshi's is a daring, moving and original voice.
Contents
The Lion
Entomological Specimens
Practicing Your Skills
Insomniac
What Every Girl Should Know Before Marriage
Taster
Bad Day in the Office
You Are Not
My Mother's Hair
The Gold Bangles
'Jesus Saves'
Ticking
On Ellington Road
Cousin Migrant
The Daughters
Different Principles of Enclosure
Day Ghost
This Morning
The Bird
Almost September
Phone Call on a Train Journey
Small Hands
In the Coroner's Office
April
18th of November
Notes Towards an Elegy
The Urn
The Rain That Began Elsewhere
Gloves
My Father Wants to be a Rooftop Railway Surfer
Ghazal
Ghazal
Ode to a Pomegranate
Bulbul
Parvarti waits for the return of Shiva, after the slaying of Ganesh
Lost Poem
Large and Imprecise Baby
Wireman
Barbule
The Found Thing
Woman at Window
Mr Beeharry's Marriage Bureau
Mrs M Unravels
Ballad of the Small-Boned Daughter
Hummingbird
