A captivating, no-holds-barred collection of new poems from an acclaimed poet and novelist with a fierce and original voice
Dothead is an exploration of selfhood both intense and exhilarating. Within the first pages, Amit Majmudar asserts the claims of both the self and the other: the title poem shows us the place of an Indian American teenager in the bland surround of a mostly white peer group, partaking of imagery from the poet’s Hindu tradition; the very next poem is a fanciful autobiography, relying for its imagery on the religious tradition of Islam. From poems about the treatment at the airport of people who look like Majmudar (“my dark unshaven brothers / whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends”) to a long, freewheeling abecedarian poem about Adam and Eve and the discovery of oral sex, Dothead is a profoundly satisfying cultural critique and a thrilling experiment in language. United across a wide range of tones and forms, the poems inhabit and explode multiple perspectives, finding beauty in every one.
Praise
“Supurb….inventive, playful….Majmudar finds poetry in the modern world where we least expect it.”--Bookpage
“Especially perceptive about manhood and its meanings…Dothead is charming and urgent in equal measure.” --Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Library Journal listed DOTHEAD as one of their Spring poetry picks of 2016 for “pointedly offering commentary on those who aren’t always at home in America.”
“Dothead amounts to nothing less than a torrent of poetic inventiveness driven by the inexhaustible poetic energy of Amit Majmudar. His delight in deploying his formal skills combines remarkably with his wide range of interests to produce a collection of poetry both riveting and enviable. Drones, torture, immigration, weaponry, James Bond, King Lear, medical practice, Hinduism, and the sex life of Adam and Eve are but a few of the subjects treated here without any sacrifice of lyric texture or pulse. Majmudar stands out clearly and forcefully in the overpopulated tableau of contemporary American poetry.”—Billy Collins
“Readers new to Amit Majmudar’s work will rejoice to find themselves in the company of a writer who clearly believes no poem can enlighten unless it first entertains. We are invariably surprised—by Kafkaesque fable or Borgesian paradox, by fluently rhymed verse, a calligramme, or some outrageous form of his own invention. However Majmudar has Hardy’s knack of finding forms well suited to his subject, these wise, timely meditations on race, sex, language and identity leave us thinking about nothing more than the radical ideas they propose. All serve Majmudar’s larger project—to reflect the uncomfortable complexity of the human animal. He has no hesitation in juxtaposing the serious and the grave, the base and the transcendent, and those acts of gentleness and brutality which define us; but his ability to turn on a dime will often have the reader laughing or shivering before he has a chance to prepare his defences. Majmudar has allied an old-fashioned talent to a real experimental boldness, but perhaps the most startling aspect of his work is its unapologetic assumption of poetry’s intrinsic cultural value. One has the sense that every line simply believes in itself. The result is a various, wakeful, urgent poetry that asks to be read now.”—Don Paterson
Click on the covers below to purchase Majmudar's first two volumes:
0',0' (Zero Degrees, Zero Degrees): Poems
Published by Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books in 2009, this volume includes work that previously appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology (2007), Poetry Magazine, Poetry Daily, The Antioch Review, 32 Poems, The New England Review, The Dark Horse, Light Quarterly, FIELD, First Things, Gulf Coast, Image, JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Humanities, 150 Contemporary Sonnets, The National Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Smartish Pace, TriQuarterly, and Salt Hill, and went on to be a finalist in the Poetry Society of America's Norma Faber First Book Award.
Click HERE to hear Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2, Raiders of the Lost Ark) read the sonnet "A Pedestrian" for National Poetry Month.
Other poems from the volume are available HERE at the Poetry Foundation Website.
Click HERE to hear Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2, Raiders of the Lost Ark) read the sonnet "A Pedestrian" for National Poetry Month.
Other poems from the volume are available HERE at the Poetry Foundation Website.
Heaven and Earth
The second collection of poetry won the 2011 Donald Justice Prize, selected by A. E. Stallings. From the prize citation:
"Western" literature begins, in the Iliad, with a clash of Occident and Orient, a fertile tension that Majmudar explores to explosive and imaginative effect in Heaven and Earth. In "Telemachus," the eponymous modern-day narrator from Ithaca, New York, seeks out his father-soldier who has disappeared in "wind-worn and war-winded Afghanistan," only to find him having gone native, "speaking casual Pashto with his brothers." Poet-as-archeologist sifts through the layers of Troy in "Hysserlik Ghazal," whose self-contained couplets going over the same ground prove form is metaphor. The aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan on US soldiers is explored with devastating, clear-eyed precision (a reminder that Majmudar comes from the tradition of poet-physician) in "The Walter Reed Sonnets." Though this book spans from Genesis to the present, from Afghanistan to America, from this world to the next, Majmudar is perhaps at his most engaging when charting a rocky personal geography, family and fatherhood. "Two cultures make a diplomat / But cannot make a soul," he remarks, wryly. But Majmudar shows us they can also make something rarer: an original poet.
"Western" literature begins, in the Iliad, with a clash of Occident and Orient, a fertile tension that Majmudar explores to explosive and imaginative effect in Heaven and Earth. In "Telemachus," the eponymous modern-day narrator from Ithaca, New York, seeks out his father-soldier who has disappeared in "wind-worn and war-winded Afghanistan," only to find him having gone native, "speaking casual Pashto with his brothers." Poet-as-archeologist sifts through the layers of Troy in "Hysserlik Ghazal," whose self-contained couplets going over the same ground prove form is metaphor. The aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan on US soldiers is explored with devastating, clear-eyed precision (a reminder that Majmudar comes from the tradition of poet-physician) in "The Walter Reed Sonnets." Though this book spans from Genesis to the present, from Afghanistan to America, from this world to the next, Majmudar is perhaps at his most engaging when charting a rocky personal geography, family and fatherhood. "Two cultures make a diplomat / But cannot make a soul," he remarks, wryly. But Majmudar shows us they can also make something rarer: an original poet.