Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Poem in Asian Cha

Here.

Also Anindita Sengupta and Todd Swift in this issue.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

that's a fine looking mag; congrats!

Anonymous said...

is lovely.

dipali said...

Beautiful.

Cheshire Cat said...

I especially like the first two stanzas. One quibble is with the use of "His wife" in the third. Why not just "She" - isn't this the same character who appears in the previous stanza?

Space Bar said...

nushor, ??!, dipali: thanks.

cat: no. two separate characters: the one who is watching, and the wife of the dead man. i suppose because they share a gender it is confusing.

Cheshire Cat said...

ah, makes sense then...

Falstaff said...

Like Cat, I didn't get the two different people bit.

I really liked lines 6 - 12 and the 'familiar odour of old clothes' bit. I'm still trying to decide whether I like "she hovers around the body like a fly" - it's an interesting and arresting image (not least because of the connection to Dickinson), but it conjures up a sense of nervous busy-ness that feels at odds with the scene. I also think the adjectives 'old' in line 20 and 'public' in line 12 are unnecessary. And I would have preferred 'as' instead of 'like' in line 19.

One other quibble - and this may be just that I'm not imagining this right - but if his hands are laid out across his chest then how can she see his palms? Wouldn't they be laid palms downward?

kuffir said...

no punctuation, not even parentheses, no uppercase letters. a poem stripped to its bare soul.

Abhinav Maurya said...

I loved Asian Cha right from its first issue. It has the feel of homely literature, something that is not found (or found very little of) even in the best of literary journals. When they said they were trying to wean away from the clutter of literary emagazines, I believed them. And your poem fits snug there. :-)