None of this is the city. All of it is you.
So writes Siddhartha Bose in his new book of experimental poetry – Digital Monsoon. In this follow-up to the acclaimed debut Kalagora, Bose proposes the poet as a twenty-first century beatnik, a ravenous language machine eating up the margins of the city.
Dreams trigger extraordinary visions of an apocalyptic London populated by technologised bodies; beat-boxers and graffiti writers as urban oracles; the ghosts of a multicultural city moving through banks and brothels, kebab shops and squat parties. Dispatches from the post-industrial landscapes of the North, and from the poet’s hometowns of Mumbai and Kolkata, complete this raw and uncompromisingly modern collection of poems and texts. Composed in Bose’s trademark rhythmical, open field style, Digital Monsoon celebrates the dynamism of the urban edgeland in an updated Jazz Age poetic.
x
Reviews
Poems with the sprung dazzle of jazz. Siddhartha Bose makes it new.
Jeet Thayil, author of Narcopolis
This new poetry collection plunges into the scuzzy, frothy, beautiful underbelly of London. Forget odes upon Westminster Bridge, Siddhartha Bose is all about Hackney Wick, getting under its skin and the people who live there (including himself) … But what we most love about this collection is how the imagery explodes dirtily in your mind. You may never look at cities the same way again.
prophetic, brave and experimental [...] Monsoon seems to lift, quite literally, like water from the page [...] powerfully unsettling, and extremely challenging.
Bare Fiction
x
Readers’ comments
I read through Digital Monsoon in one sitting one evening last week and it made me completely giddy with delight. So brilliantly bizarre and playful.
Praise for Kalagora
Rampantly active and radioactive poetry … Kalagora is a vital book of poems for the 21st century
James Byrne
One of the most exciting first collections I’ve come across in a long time
Ian MacMillan, BBC Radio 3
Bose’s use of language – invented words, nouns made into verbs and other colourful concoctions – produces a writhing, seething, pulsating poetry
Poetry Book Society Bulletin
A collection that is always dramatic, always in tune with the sensational possibilities of language
Wasafiri