Where I Live: New and Selected Poems - Reading by Arundhathi Subramaniam - Tue 2nd, NCPA
Karishma Pais
__________________________________________________________________
Where I Live: New and Selected Poems
Poetry Reading by Arundhathi Subramaniam
Audio Visual Room
Tue. 2nd February - 6.30 PM
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 free on a first-come-first-served basis.