RENDANG
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY 2020
A startlingly radical and surreal poetic journey, RENDANG takes the reader from West Sumatra to Planet Mongo via Gray's Inn Road, alighting on Indonesian artefacts, gentrification, and citizenry. RENDANG is an urgent comment on what it means to be a person now, a dissection of and love letter to the histories, places, and things that make us.
Through adept and complex language play, a ludic voice, and a masterful command of form, Will Harris creates a poetry that charts the ambivalences, difficulties, and voices of our contemporary landscape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Tjandra Sari,/ I call you wrongly. Rend me/ rightly. Rootless and unclear," concludes the first poem in Harris's sonically rich debut, following a page of riffs on the book's title: "rend, renderer, rendezvous." (Rendang is a Sumatran stew.) Of British and Chinese-Indonesian descent, Harris writes vividly on language and family, conjuring cityscapes from London to Chicago to Jakarta, continually reimagining his own visions. Amid racism and violence, these poems still manage to sing: "chanting in bloom my soul before/ I knowed it chanting too/ I ran down to the tube and from/ Gray's Inn Rd to Farringdon to the Golden Lane Estate/ buddleia not buddha chanting in bloom." While the collection opens with a quotation by Derek Walcott (and questions of empire circle throughout), the book ends with a nod to W.S. Merwin's poem about failing as a son. Here, Harris offers an urgent and moving exploration of cultural identity and legacy, one made all the richer by its unique narrative structure and playful attention to sound.
