"I absorb the world between you and us, in me the white world reaches extinction." In this stunning collection of ambitious new work, Nisha Ramayya explores themes of ritual and rapture, orgasms, racism, shit, architecture, kinship and mimesis, clarity and myth, self and cosmos, cosmos and community, stricture and escape, dearth and syncope, translation and transmigration, Tantric metaphysics, the communion of radical alterities (lip and tooth, temple and flower), and legitimate modes of inclusion beyond the intelligible. These are powerful poems, and their power is distinctive: a power of stupefaction and clarification, like very cold water that stuns the diver down to the bone, and as it does so, puts into them an awareness of the emptiness of their own flesh. This is the sort of poetry that speaks in many voices. But it distinctively assured that these many voices are also one voice: a voice which speaks with a kind of fractal calm, an effervescent serenity, which synthesises analysis and intuition, discipline and desire. At times it accomplishes a kind of plainness and purity, an energy suggestive of utter incomparability, the equity of entirely singular entities brought into relations. These are poems that approach half in terror, half in celebration, half in excess. Layer by layer, angle by angle, gathering fragments, and gathering spaces where fragments can cohere in singular sense, this is work that seeks to re-radicalise multiplicity, and to re-enchant plenitude.

In Me The Juncture

Literature & Fiction

Ramayya, Nisha

Poetry

Sad Press

Love is a many-headed snake in Nisha Ramayya’s debut poetry collection, twisting its way through devotion, sacrifice, and bliss. Seeking a way home, Ramayya discovers that homecoming - the impossible return - is a process of make-believe and magical thinking across Britain, India, and the infinite expanse. Ramayya’s visionary poetry traces an opalescent, treacherous world by way of heritage, ritual, and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. Meditating on diasporic identity and relationships, her writing roams the Indo-European language family, finds consolation in genealogies of decolonial and anti-racist resistance, and roots itself in the movements between ancient Sanskrit texts and contemporary feminist prose poems. In Ramayya’s hands, the body assumes many forms as love produces many states: attraction and repulsion, excitement and exhaustion, selfishness and the dissolution of self. Desire, eroticism, and care contain the possibilities of shame, fury, and destruction. Moving towards and away from love, being translated and transformed by love, suffering under love and refusing its power - the poems in this book never leave love’s hold.

States of the Body Produced by Love

Ignota Books

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Books by Ramayya, Nisha

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ramayya, Nisha. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

In Me The Juncture

States of the Body Produced by Love