English as a Second Language and Other Poems

by Jaswinder Bolina

Overview

Warm tenderness and fiery critique sit side-by-side in Bolina’s English as A Second Language, a collection that skewers, laments, and celebrates America with intelligence, humility, and a disarming sense of humor.

In Jaswinder Bolina’s English as A Second Language and Other Poems, we are asked to imagine the tender and harsh realities of this world within a single breath— a Steiff monkey resting next to a child in a crib and the tired hands of “a thousand /women in Sidi Bouzid” assembling the stuffed animal. Coated in an armor of wit and humor and steeped in the idiosyncrasies of language, English as a Second Language pits sentimentality against cynicism and the personal against the national. What remains is the kaleidoscopic image of the modern American condition.

From elegy to persona, wide-ranging poems tell the story of a child of immigrants becoming a parent against the tumultuous backdrop of our politics and culture. Where the collection asks, “What chance do any of us have?,” the poet finds hope, possibility. Bolina’s musical poems zip across time, challenging the fixity of the book. Clues offer the possibility of an alternate reading, where backwards, a new emotional arc appears—dreamlike, the nostalgic origin story of a sleep-deprived parent tracing a path through language and history. Forwards, backwards, English as a Second Language skewers, laments, and celebrates America with intelligence and humility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596575
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jaswinder Bolina’s previous books include his debut essay collection Of Color (McSweeney’s 2020) and three full-length poetry collections, The 44th of July (Omnidawn 2019), Phantom Camera (New Issues Press 2013)—winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize in Poetry—and Carrier Wave (CLP 2007)—winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry. He is also author of the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (Floating Wolf Quarterly 2014). His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares, among others. His essays have been featured at The Washington Post, Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Believer, Poetry Foundation dot org, and others. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Miami.

Read an Excerpt

English as a Second Language

We came upon a line of English 

eating dog, we thought, on plump bread 

steamed and slathered with a drab yellow

chutney from a cart in the Kew Gardens. 

Wankers, they looked to us, offending 

nature, but we asked the dog-whalla 

for one apiece—me, your Gian uncle, 

and the elder Sahota who held up

seven fingers, then pointed to the sky:

a code of theirs he’d broken. 

The dog-whalla just shook his head,

counted our shillings, surrendered 

three green glass bottles of 7-Up, 

three warm logs in aluminium.

In 1967, you could hear a song

by The Beatles on anybody’s radio,

but what did The Beatles know about us

huddled together in our conspiracy 

on a bench beneath a kind of tree 

I’d never seen before? Anyway, 

we were young and having fun, 

the shit-eating grin on Gian’s face

as we brought the dog meat to our mouths.

When you sack the wanker’s estate, 

you have to raid the wanker’s kitchen. 

You dress in his topcoat and drink his gin. 

You set his horses free and drive them 

home through the rain. You see? We weren’t 

afraid. We didn’t come here to become 

like them. We came here to eat.

Waiting My Turn

Honestly, Elizabeth, I think I’d rather be the 239th 

Jaswinder on the moon than the 1st, 

rather myself an nth brown anybody 

in a hand-me-down helmet, a second-hand 

pressure suit, my capsule certified 

and pre-owned, the dull interns yawning

at their stations in the humdrum easy 

of ground control, my khaki booster 

routinely returning to rest on its pad, 

otherworldly for its exertion for sure,

but when it says, “Boys, I seen everything, 

boys,” to the gleaming white rockets,

they’re gassing up, readying for Neptune, 

snickering, “The moon?? Everybody’s been 

to the goddamn moon,” though I am 239,000 

miles out of earshot, stepping onto the lethal grit 

of the goddamned moon, beaming, “At last. 

It’s my fucking turn at last.”

Editorial Reviews

Praise for English as a Second Language and Other Poems

“With his third collection, Jaswinder Bolina hits his stride, melding fierce and heartbroken politics with a flair for the surreal to portray America in the throes of the pandemic. . . . Bolina's ironic humor feels like the inevitable vehicle for this insight, and these poems are often darkly laugh-out-loud funny.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

“Always delivered with an edge of irony and incomparable wordcraft, Bolina's lyrics are by turns vividly imagistic ('starlings made an ecstatic / calligraphy against the gloam'), acoustically playful ('the umber end / of summer'), and infused with an acute scrutiny of historical and current events as the specter of American politics haunts the book. . . . Satisfying in its own right, this title should also compel readers to check out the rest of this author's urgently relevant work.”—Diego Báez, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW

“Bolina has gathered the mundane moments that make up a life and turned them into sparkling gems.”—Publishers Weekly

“Jaswinder Bolina turns the elegy on its head (or at least twists its arm) . . . and they are so often comic, making the reader chuckle as often as weep.”—Charles Rammelkamp, The Lake

“Pierces through its sketch-comedy conceit . . . with poignent anxieties.”—Christopher Spaide, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation

“A testament to Bolina’s command of verse, each poem infused with musicality and sharp wit. The book confronts the complexities of living in a nation increasingly intolerant to immigrant families, both as the child of immigrants and a father in conflict with his own emotions. Readers encounter anger and exasperation with systemic oppression, but also sheer joy and optimism in the small celebrations of parenthood, rendering English as a Second Language and Other Poems one of the most accessible and timely collections of the year.”—The Poetry Question

Praise for Jaswinder Bolina

“Jaswinder Bolina remains a sincere poet of necessary ironies, and The 44th of July is his opus, his ode to how well our nation falls apart in front of us. Or, I should say, this book is a proper chronicle of how the ideal of America was never really made whole for all whom it claimed… These Whitmanian litanies and lovely long sentences mean to include the excluded and even to afford for delight where evil thrives. This is a brilliant book by a masterful poet.”—Jericho Brown

“But Bolina is not a magician, although sometimes a poet, a philosopher, can appear as one. He is simply paying attention. He’s being sincere. And so Bolina will do in Of Color what a magician cannot: he will reveal how the trick is done.”—The Rumpus

“[Bolina] aims not so much to influence public opinion as to stitch back together shards of a torn dialog and bring it depth. The imagery comes bursting forth studded with sharp details about a wide range of subjects, from alienation to poverty to social protest.”—Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW

“As full of candor and ontological inquiry as they are of verve, panache, and wit, the poems in Bolina’s second collection stretch and dilate, in order to, as the author puts it, ‘feel so attached—like a ligament—to the whole shebang of human experience.’ These poems include subject matter of all kinds, and to read them can feel like being led through the chaos of contemporary life by a warm yet incisive mind.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

“Yes, these are ‘political poems’ but they are more than that—these are poems that are so well made that they sing; they roll off your tongue and strike through your soul.”—Victoria Chang

From the Publisher