kyrie eleison or all robins taken out of context

by Debasis Mukhopadhyay

Overview

An unflinching collection of poems that breathe in our dark times. From cover to cover an unstoppable current of tumbling phrases take the reader on a trip down the rabbit hole and through contemporary history. Blade-edged yet somehow tender, the book reconciles the poetics and the political. With its visceral attention to beauty & brutality, the book brilliantly exploits the narrow seam between abstract & immediate, sublime & ordinary. Expect the book to haunt you.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635343069
Publisher:	Finishing Line Press
Publication date:	09/22/2017
Pages:	42
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.09(d)

About the Author

Debasis Mukhopadhyay was born in India in 1965. He spent most of his childhood in Calcutta, under the care of his maternal grandmother, who, from his early childhood, helped shape his interest in literature. As he grew up, he became a voracious and wide reader, drawn into a lifelong love affair with the written word. The rest of his childhood and adolescence was spent in small towns of West Bengal, where his father worked as a doctor in government hospitals. When Debasis was sixteen, in the throes of adolescent revolutionary idealism, he abandoned his studies and home and spent an itinerant year wandering through villages and meeting people from all walks of life. After that year, he returned home and began to channel his experiences into writing, as well as editing little magazines. The late 1980s found him back in Calcutta, where he enrolled in Alliance Française, excelling in French and then working there as a teacher and interpreter-translator for the written and audiovisual French and Francophone press. He also co-founded Polyphony, a non-profit for intercultural dialogues and transcultural communications. In 2000, he married Arpita Chakravarti, then a medical student. They moved to Canada in 2004, where he attended Université Laval, Québec, completing a PhD in literary studies in 2014. Though Debasis had been writing poems since his Calcutta years, he did not begin submitting his poems until 2015. Since then, his poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the USA, UK, Spain & Canada, including Posit, Words Dance, The Curly Mind, Erbacce, Strange Poetry, Yellow Cahir Review, Rat's Ass Review, The New Verse News, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Algebra of Owls, Mannequiin.Haüs, Of/With, Thirteen Myna Birds, Whale Road Review, Scarlet Leaf Review, With Painted Words, Writers Against Prejudice, Apple Fruits of an Old Oak, Voice of Monarch Butterflies, etc. His work has been nominated for the Best of the Net. Debasis now lives in Montréal with his wife and son. When he is not writing, his best inspiration turns out to be what Xu Schen wrote (58 CE - ca. 147 CE): "Ink, whose semantic component is 'earth', is black."

Table of Contents

kyrie eleison, or a surplus of fallen robins 1

an elegy for the flayed ox 2

the narrow skull of Aylan Kurdi 4

still buried in the foxholes 5

the sum of empty holes 6

telescope & night ornaments 7

menos tu vientre 8

a zebra i want to write a zebra 11

between ink & inkblot 12

Birobidzhan or one day in the life of Jose Maria 13

watching is harder than asphyxiation 18

death & other litanies 20

how far are we really from Havana? 22

Lorca’s body will never be found 24

Editorial Reviews

An assured and powerful collection of articulated mourning and controlled rage for those silenced in acts of conflict. Debasis Mukhopadhyay exhumes the shadowlands and places the lives that cast them firmly into the light to be witnessed as they should through testaments of poetry. What impressed me most about these poems was the courage to experiment different forms through a stark mnemonic style of vivid imagery and a much-needed social conscience for these dark times. An impressive and courageous suite of poems and prose by a writer who has a strong ability to blend narrative into form so the poems are felt raw and all the harder hitting for it.

Antony Owen, author of Margaret Thatcher’s Museum

The poems in Debasis Mukhopadhyay’s new chapbook, kyrie eleison or all robins taken out of context, seamlessly interweave the most apparently irreconcilable materials of contemporary poetry: the horror of global injustice with the improbable persistence of beauty. These powerful poems manage to address a reality in which the continuing reign of bombs, shrapnel, bullets, and drones, coexists with the inspiration of Lorca, Ginsberg, Kafka, Beckett, and Van Gogh, beetroots and hummingbirds, moonlight and music. Braided into the relentless horror of Mukhopadhyay’s blunt and inescapable images is an ethereal lyricism in which “the night is your wool of time your doom your womb of lilac . . . hankering for the warm breath of the stars / through the rips of a sultry sky.” Ultimately, it is the demonstrated persistence of this beauty which assures the reader of this chapbook that somehow, we still “have a right to be optimistic about the world.”

Susan Lewis, editor and publisher of Posit, author of Heisenberg’s Salon and This Visit

In this collection, Debasis Mukhopadhyay takes us inside bodies—bones, blood, skulls, chests—sometimes figuratively, but more often literally with bullets and bombs, coffins and graves. Mukhopadhyay invokes Godot and Van Gogh as he uses surreal image-scapes to examine violence around the globe, from historical events in Cuba, Spain, and Germany to present-day violence in Syria, Pakistan, and the United States. Mukhopadhyay writes, “i could see History was wrought beneath the frippery of dovetailed blueprints of gratuitous violence,” but even so, he also writes, “yes i have a right to be optimistic about the world.”

Katie Manning, Author of Tasty Other and The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman

From the Publisher