Prageeta Sharma's poems offer the reader an unusually modern take on modernity. Her effective program of whimsy, identity, and loneliness--a singularly modern loneliness, replete with the anxiety of community and the despair of belonging--transforms the simple declarations and observations into the stuff of myth.

The Opening Question

Literature & Fiction

Sharma, Prageeta

Literary

Fence Books

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "The use of poetry in this day and age is for its lesson of relation. BLISS TO FILL is full of love poems, full of I and you and all their difficulties in getting along. And here, in the midst of love's intimacies, the poem is large and necessary, negotiating places and cultures, negotiating what it means to be relating across boundaries. This is a stunning collection."—Juliana Spahr"While others were writing software Prageeta Sharma was writing Dear ____ or BLISS TO FILL, a rhapsodic collection in which the poet uncannily braids the young and anticipatory with the elderly and elegantly alone. Her medium: loyalty; her climate: tender. She pleasures us by her agile shifts in mood and her lithe twists of tongue. This is a delicately fierce book."—C. D. Wright

Bliss to Fill

Poetry

Subpress

An exploration of the compatibility of human desire with personal ethics is at the heart of INFAMOUS LANDSCAPES. In these poems Sharma turns away from Romanticism with a certain disconcerted, feminine shame, one that finds her peering through a gendered lens. The landscapes are urban and "natural," inasmuch as both inhere in the human psyche as symbol and metaphor.

Infamous Landscapes

Taking its title from the descent into Hell in the opening passage of Homer’s Iliadand crowded brave souls into the undergloom”Prageeta Sharma's fourth collection chronicles personal and internal wars using the American frontier as a central metaphor to address questions of community and belonging, outsiderness, and the inevitability of a racialized self.
From "Will You Let Go For Ransom?":
NO.
And so deep was the fall, what a drop; I had nicks on my knuckles.
There is a passage of time for all of it to hold you, then you hold it, you wring it by its neck, it’s murderous and invisiblea darkling spot that grips.
And on some days, we would head to the barin the middle of the river, the wail or the cries there found us.
Some colleagues had tears down each eye. Some other colleagues made them cry.
We tried handing them words, but it all became inaccurate fast. I held my purse in my fist.
Not sure if this was a place I could get mugged, But I was reminded that it wasn’t. I was still unsure.
The first-generation child of a South Asian immigrant family and a native of Framingham, Massachusetts, Prageeta Sharma is the author of Bliss to Fill, The Opening Question (selected by Peter Gizzi for the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize), and Infamous Landscapes. She is also the recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Grant. Sharma is associate professor and director of the creative writing program at the University of Montana.

Undergloom

United States

Offering a series of poems rooted in the profoundly narrative yet disorienting experience of losing a loved one, Prageeta Sharma, in Grief Sequence, summons all of her resources in order to attempt any semblance, poetic or otherwise, of clear sense in trauma. In doing so she shows that grief, frustrating to logic and yet as real as any experience we might know, is ripe for the sort of intellectual and emotional processing of which poetry is most capable.

Grief Sequence

Wave Books

Offering a series of poems rooted in the profoundly narrative yet disorienting experience of losing a loved one, Prageeta Sharma, inGrief Sequence, summons all of her resources in order to attempt any semblance, poetic or otherwise, of clear sense in trauma. In doing so she shows that grief, frustrating to logic and yet as real as any experience we might know, is ripe for the sort of intellectual and emotional processing of which poetry is most capable.

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

Books by Sharma, Prageeta

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

The Opening Question

Bliss to Fill

Infamous Landscapes

Undergloom

Grief Sequence

Grief Sequence