"I absorb the world between you and us, in me the white world reaches extinction."
In this stunning collection of ambitious new work, Nisha Ramayya explores themes of ritual and rapture, orgasms, racism, shit, architecture, kinship and mimesis, clarity and myth, self and cosmos, cosmos and community, stricture and escape, dearth and syncope, translation and transmigration, Tantric metaphysics, the communion of radical alterities (lip and tooth, temple and flower), and legitimate modes of inclusion beyond the intelligible.
These are powerful poems, and their power is distinctive: a power of stupefaction and clarification, like very cold water that stuns the diver down to the bone, and as it does so, puts into them an awareness of the emptiness of their own flesh.
This is the sort of poetry that speaks in many voices. But it distinctively assured that these many voices are also one voice: a voice which speaks with a kind of fractal calm, an effervescent serenity, which synthesises analysis and intuition, discipline and desire. At times it accomplishes a kind of plainness and purity, an energy suggestive of utter incomparability, the equity of entirely singular entities brought into relations.
These are poems that approach half in terror, half in celebration, half in excess. Layer by layer, angle by angle, gathering fragments, and gathering spaces where fragments can cohere in singular sense, this is work that seeks to re-radicalise multiplicity, and to re-enchant plenitude.