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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An attentive critique on contemporary reality—modernity, capitalism, industrialization—this first United States publication of Mangalesh Dabral, presented in bilingual English and Hindi, speaks for the dislocated, disillusioned people of our time. Juxtaposing the rugged Himalayan backdrop of Dabral's youth with his later migration in search of earning a livelihood, this collection explores the tense relationship between country and city. Speaking in the language of deep irony, these compassionate poems also depict the reality of diaspora among ordinary people and the middle class, underlining the big disillusionment of post-Independence India.
"Song of the Dislocated"
With a heavy heart we left
tore away from the ancestral home
mud slips behind us now
stones fall in a hail
look back a bit brother
how the doors shut themselves
behind each one of them
a room utterly forlorn
Mangalesh Dabral was born in 1948 in the Tehri Garhwal district of the Himalayas. The author of nine books of poetry, essays, and other genres, his work has been translated and published in all major Indian languages and in Russian, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Polish, and Bulgarian. He has spent his adult life as a literary editor for various newspapers published in Delhi and other north Indian cities, and has been featured at numerous international events and festivals, including the International Poetry Festival. The recipient of many literary awards, he has also translated into Hindi the works of Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, Ernesto Cardenal, Yannis Ritsos, Tadeusz Rozewicz, and Zbigniew Herbert. Dabral lives in Ghaziabad, India.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stories in Cox's debut collection are as varied as they are sharp and surprising, venturing fearlessly into unexpected territory. The stories neither revere nor despise their Oklahoma setting, even as many of Cox's delightfully odd characters feel stuck there and dream of someday getting out. A man robs a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the first of "Three Small Town Stories," prompting a revelation about the contradictions of small-town life. In the second of the three stories, readers meet Melissa and Shane, a young college couple home for the summer who, while on a miserable hayride, slowly realize how difficult it would be to escape where they came from. "Adolescence in B Flat" features a high school girl who answers phones at a telephone museum while eavesdropping on the conversations of strangers through the use of a switchboard room believed to be defunct, and who is ultimately exposed to more of human nature than she bargained for. "Old West Night" is narrated by an actor portraying a hero in a western and who, during a lengthy weather delay in shooting the film, witnesses an act of violence he doesn't understand that reminds him that he is an outsider in Oklahoma. Some of the stories, such as "Glue," in which a lonely woman working a boring office job magically corresponds with the object of her desire, veer off course, but Cox's powerful narrative voice saves them from becoming too involved in their own eccentricities. This is a daring and confidently written collection.
