Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Series: NYRB Poets
ISBN: 9781681374017
Pages: 264
Publication Date: November 12, 2019

Treasured Indian poet Arvind Mehrotra once described himself as "a speechless shadow in a world of sound." Tracing the turns of his lyric universe, which whirls between the fabled West and timeless East, between sunset and Dehra Dun, between poisoned wells and Heian diary, between hoopoe and dentist, sultan and ironing lady, memory and lover, gatha and translation, we are the speechless shadow, awed by the depths and concision of his inventive wit, erupting aloud at his offbeat humor, following his light footprints across the bridge of tradition and renewal to the "approaching path where we’ve always been arriving.”
—Jeffrey Yang

[Mehrotra's] sense of humor is like the shadow of a sideways smile. It’s a quietly forceful collection.
—Lauren Kane, The Paris Review Daily

In his best poems, Mehrotra proves to be a master storyteller with a peculiar taste for the uncanny; this is what makes his poetry a constant pleasure for the reader and an endless, delightful challenge for the critic.
—Graziano Krätli, Rain Taxi Review of Books

Mehrotra is a major poet expanding the possibilities of poetry in English.
—Keith Taylor, New York Journal of Books

One of the finest poets working in any language...a poet-critic of an exceptionally high order.
—Peter D. McDonald

Mehrotra has consciously charted for himself a personal and a poetical tradition. [The translated] texts influence and modulate Mehrotra’s English poems in their craft and content in the same way that the English poems feed into the "other."
—Mantra Mukim, Asymptote

Mehrotra’s great achievement is to let us in, as few other modern writers have, to the speaker’s experience of accident and wonder.
—Amit Chaudhuri

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has written masterpieces. That few know this is testament only to a widespread ignorance of Indian poetry. His poems resist overt displays of nationality (although they depict, with ever-varied nonconformity, the nuances of India neighborhoods), and they’ve a minimalist, rather than a maximalist, distinctiveness. It’s time they gained a worldwide audience.
—Vidyan Ravinthiran