Description
Book SynopsisIn this dazzling debut collection by Indian-born poet Siddhartha Bose, the cities of Kolkata, Mumbai, New York and London are transformed into sites of fractured vision.
Trade ReviewThere is a sense of an Odyssean voyage, a continuous exile, full of temptation and danger ... This is a collection that is always dramatic, always in tune with the sensational possibilities of language. - Wasafiri One of the most exciting first collections I've come across in a long time ... Kalagora bestrides continents and celebrates cities as engines of creativity where dogs talk in hieroglyphs and where a man can be a moth. - Ian McMillan, The Verb, BBC Radio 3 Kalagora is an incantatory assertion, if not of identity, then of power and confidence in moving through identities. - Magma Bose's use of language - invented words, nouns made into verbs and other colourful concoctions - produces a writhing, seething, pulsating poetry. - Poetry Book Society Bulletin Siddhartha Bose intrigues, surprises, shocks and seduces the reader, pushing the text to the edges of truth. This is a guttural, painfully honest text, yet at times tender and emotive, the sound of the poems creating a form of sculpture for the ear. A truly contemporary work which does what good poetry does best: to make the personal universal and the international local. - Anthony Joseph
Table of ContentsI... Prolectric Kalagora II... Sunya Little Taste Journey Schooldays Romanticism Nameless Sleepless (in America) Wandering shadow Proposal Sex and the City Back and Forth Swansong, Mile End East Village, New York Entracte III... Maya Sketching Eye Candy Hampi (Ruins) Garden, Bangalore Still Life: Artichoke Triangle Shoreditch Serenade IV... Nagri Prologue/novel Animal City Finding Time Chinatown, New York Benares Portrait, Little Lane, Calcutta Istanbul, November, '03 Mother's Lament V... Epilepsis Sketching (slight return)
