Space Gulliver

Boldly playful, ingenious, associative and mercurial, Sampurna Chattarji's new poems careen through varied terrain, geographic and linguistic, in a dizzy journey of defamiliarization, as the alien protagonist, Space Gulliver, extends and challenges habitual ideas of what constitutes the mundane. In the process, she proceeds to recover for herself the sense of 'first-time-ness', the art of being 'vulnerable to every body that rests against mine, vulnerable to the word "eagle", the idea of the scar that the knife has left around the heart'. She also recovers the art of living on the edge - 'a good place to sit when you wish/ to regard the world you had insanely loved/ and now feel only a puzzled affection for'. Here is a book that blends intellectual enquiry, a taste for whimsy and a love of language into challenging and audacious poetry. -- Arundhathi Subramaniam