I’ve been hammering away so long at/ it, sweating blood like a slave at a/ pyramid-construction site, that I don’t/ even have to try anymore: every/ word I touch metamorphoses into// poetry. You see me/ doggedly hammering away at the/ keyboard, typing out a, 1,000-page un-/ readable document without missing/ a single punctuation but you don’t/ know that in my bedside drawer is a/ manuscript of un-publishable poetry,/ written out in a careful hand with green/ ink on yellow paper.// Do you know how long it has taken me to type out these poems?” Das Gupta’s confidence and his take on poetry strike at the outset, as he writes: “ I’m more obstinate than the/ underground train/ tunneling its way through the rocky ab-/ -domen of the city. This first collection of poems is gauged by a sophisticated heart. He rightly propounds: “One of assets is an ability to rhyme and metricise naturally and unobtrusively, harnessing the way we talk at moments of heightened emotion, all that while pulling off a conversational precision, down to semicolons in dialogue.” In the preface to the collection Das Gupta writes a long poem titled “Obstinacy,” a soliloquy, where he asks: “… You think you know me?/ You’ve no fucking idea how lucid/ and dangerous I can be. Missing You, Metropolis With humor and the serious collectors delight, Gary Jackson imagines the comic-book worlds of Superman, Batman, and the X-Men alongside the veritable worlds of Kansas, racial isolation, and the gravesides of a sister and a friend. Let me talk about Visceral Metropolis now: The book starts with an incisive foreword by Philip Nikolayev.
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