This is a CHAURAHA presentation.
This new book (Bloodaxe Publishers, UK) combines Arundhathi Subramaniam's first two collections of poetry (On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live), with a selection of new work (Deeper in Transit).
Subramaniam's poems explore various ambivalences — around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megalopolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey. They probe contradictory impulses: the desire for adventure and anchorage; expansion and containment; vulnerability and strength; withdrawal and engagement; freedom and belonging; an approach to language as exciting resource and desperate refuge.
Her new poems are a meditation on desire -- in which the sensual and sacred mingle inextricably. There is a fascination with the skins that separate self from other; self from self; thing from no-thing. These are poems of dark need, of urgency, of desire as derailment and derailment as possibility.
The book will be introduced by Gieve Patel and Adil Jussawalla, and the discussion will be moderated by Jerry Pinto.
Admission on a first-come-first-served basis.
