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“‘We poets are ear-shaped like harps,’ Sharma explains at the start of her exuberant second collection, whose disconcerting whimsy and interpersonal bite together produce a winning, if sprawling, work. The Brooklyn-based Sharma begins with expansive, even outlandish, phrasemaking and an up-to-the-minute sensibility: she explores ‘the freakish space of bother and divinity,’ asks ‘Do you greet a meaning/ that counteracts the youth culture?’ and advises readers to ‘tip your/ hat, marry stormy women,’ and "practice religion when in space, rocket-time.’ ‘Family’ considers a ‘mountain of ink’ and an awkward guest as ironic ‘friends/ of the Indian community,’ while ‘Furnished Veda’ and other mythologically inflected poems show her ‘aware of our culture's learnedness.’ As a seeming counter-tension, Sharma (Bliss to Fill) offers love poems at the volume's center that depend as much on their sports references (‘baseball threats,’ NFL starts, even badminton) as on their erotic charge. As with poets like Dean Young, the copious and zingy parts of the book can threaten to overwhelm the more layered poems, but repeated readings reveal an interrogative depth.”—Publishers' Weekl
Prageeta Sharma's poems offer the modern reader an unusually modern take on modernity: "A flaw is modern for flawless." Her effective program of whimsy, identity, and loneliness—a singularly modern loneliness, replete with the anxiety of community and the despair of belonging—transforms simple declarations and observations into the stuff of myth. "Sweet, Sweet, if human we are not quite." These poems splice western Massachusetts with the Veda and European argyle underpants with unguarded, important sentences. Of Bliss to Fill, Sharma’s first book, critic Christine Hume had this to say: "The book is as much a meditation on the inevitability of imitation and duplication as a demonstration of delight in its small variations. Sharma rhymes and chimes her way through as if each word were a homophonic translation for the next. An ebullient cadence and devilish diction, teetering on the verge of apprehension, pinball through Bliss. Each word feels its way to the next with a fierce fidelity to the sound and sense of language, and in doing so, poem after poem create strange, searching linguistic landscapes."
Endorsements:
“Sharma is inclined to explore cultural disjunctions, the glide of sound, power, and perception between people and languages: ‘you are pointing west when you say dish, desh.’ Sometimes she sounds as American as John Berryman. But at other times Sharma serializes simple declarative statements or taps into a kind of Berlitz translation diction: ‘We are an Indian family with Indian friends from India.’ In other words, her imagination is whirring at full tilt, and her approaches to the poem are varied and fresh and exciting.”—Forrest Gander
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
From the Book:
Rocket Science
It was sure to be that clock
thick ticking, the minor side
of an Indian child, to understand that a clock
can make the noise of a small Indian child.
Less specific is the math problem, the hermeneutical
circle, sleeping is extreme, the man drank so loud
I felt required, I repeat, required to kick him out.
That dream, she said, with the Indian child in it, sleeping
on a small sofa, dream she said, alongside his shoulder,
he wept, almost, as if they were at the train again,
the white ankle left for good, it sank under the tracks
the rat jumps upon tracks for the last rites, a meal
so pleasant, his slacks lazy underneath, perhaps,
she spoke this aloud, he is the man, he tips his hat,
the inhibited manner, could there be a Sufi in this crowd.
Furthermore, she answered his question, there I said sweetly,
no Dewans are about at this hour, please suggest another time,
if it is windy, I cannot relax, how do you do? Please tip your
hat, marry stormy women, fold arms,
practice religion when in space, rocket-time.
Awards/Recognition:
Fence Modern Poets Series 2003
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PRAGEETA SHARMA received an MFA in Poetry from Brown University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize, and an MA in Media Studies from The New School. Sharma’s parents came to the US from India in 1969; she was born in 1972 and grew up in Massachusetts. Sharma teaches at Cambridge College in Massachusetts and resides in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Agni, Fence, and The Women's Review of Books.
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