RaShThe Bullet Train and Other Loaded Poems

Abstract

on his head / grabs frames from the darkness ,” Kates’s choice not to use the English word “headlamp” keeps the Russian end-line emphasis on “head,” and the “flash” in “flashlight ” reinforces the sense of photographic sight. Often multilayered and dark—“Earth, dying on the eve of winter / responds to the touch like a cold corpse”—in these poems there is also a sense of possibility: “We will die and wake up as someone else, / . . . surviving our ending without trauma. / . . . we will choose for ourselves.” This is a beautifully translated volume that neither exoticizes nor renders out the joy of reading poetry grounded in another place and language . Against the “obstruct[ing]” sounds of “desiccated tendons . . . on a stringed instrument ,” Tazhi’s poetry is a music that explores our shared borders as spaces of opportunity, for the possibility of creating “an imagined world: one that absorbs music from the outside , / and will not preserve the borders / of an internal country.” Alison Mandaville California State University, Fresno RaSh The Bullet Train and Other Loaded Poems Kolkata. Hawakal. 2019. 63 pages. RaSh’s fascinating collection of poems draws immediate attention to its title. One only needs to turn over and read the first poem to understand the politics behind it. He uses the image of the bullet train as a symbol to juxtapose two uncomfortable truths together—India’s ambitious project of building a bullet train and the state-sanctioned killings of Indian rationalists and journalists like M. M. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh. The idea behind the title and the title poem is to bring to the fore the jarring reality of the parallelism between commercial ambition and human sacrifice. As the poet himself writes: “This train will now pass through / Under skin arteries and veins and nerves . . . / To topple into a depthless soul one by one.” Unlike RaSh’s previous collection of poems, Bullet Train is directly political and addresses issues that have been bothering not just the poet’s conscience but the collective conscience of many in India. In trying to create poetry out of violence, RaSh tries to break free from the stereotypical assumptions about the poet and his/her Muse. The Muse here is far from the Greek imaginary. The Muse is Asifa, a young girl repeatedly raped inside a temple and later killed as an act of vengeance on her community . The Muse is also Rohith Vemula, a young PhD scholar who, after systematic bullying by his university for being a Dalit, succumbs to suicide (see Meena Alexander’s “Death of a Young Dalit,” WLT, Nov. 2016). As historical testimonies vehemently resisting amnesia, the poems hurl a challenge to the status quo: “You can teach me / How to burn alive a peacock . . . / But, never never never never teach me / How to love . . . / You don’t know / What I know.” RaSh’s language jolts the reader out of her indifference. Lines like “her lover bought her wombandfilleditwithink to dip a quill in” transform the reader into an active listener. This is what distinguishes RaSh’s collection . Surpassing ordinary readerly expectations, these poems explode into stories of “lies, conceit, loathing, and repulsion.” The poet-witness, like his Kafka, wails for the dead and the dying at the hands of the oppressor: “Who is he to die so unceremoniously ? / ‘Like a dog,’ ‘like a dog’ . . .” Sahana Mukherjee Kolkata Karen Havelin Please Read This Leaflet Carefully New York. Dottir Press. 2019. 271 pages. Please Read This Leaflet Carefully is the interior monologue of Laura Fjellstad, a young woman made old by decades of chronic pain. Told in reverse chronology, Laura’s story is an endless cycle of enduring and managing pain from “deeply infiltrating endometriosis” that is exacerbated by asthma, severe food allergies, and prestage osteoporosis. Every element of her day in New York—from what she eats to how far she walks—is carefully orchestrated to avoid more pain. Yet, for all her planning and considering , the narrator has very little control over her daily health. This powerlessness results in physical discomfort and, perhaps more destructively, what Laura calls a “sucking vortex of anxiety.” Her thoughts are constantly at war with her family, her lovers, and herself. She both needs...