Dothead: Poems - Softcover

Majmudar, Amit

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1101947098 ISBN 13: 9781101947098

Publisher: Knopf, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

AMIT MAJMUDAR is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Dublin, Ohio, with his wife and three children. His poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry (2007, 2012), The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–2012, Poetry, Poetry Daily, and several other venues, including the eleventh edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature. His first poetry collection, 0º, 0º, was a finalist for the 2009 Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. His second poetry collection, Heaven and Earth, won the 2011 Donald Justice Prize. The first poet laureate for the state of Ohio, Majmudar blogs for the Kenyon Review and is also a critically acclaimed novelist.

www.amitmajmudar.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dothead
 
Well yes, I said, my mother wears a dot.
I know they said “third eye” in class, but it’s not
an eye eye, not like that. It’s not some freak
third eye that opens on your forehead like
on some Chernobyl baby. What it means
is, what it’s showing is, there’s this unseen
eye, on the inside. And she’s marking it.
It’s how the X that says where treasure’s at
is not the treasure, but as good as treasure.—
All right. What I said wasn’t half so measured.
In fact, I didn’t say a thing. Their laughter
had made my mouth go dry. Lunch was after
World History; that week was India—myths,
caste system, suttee, all the Greatest Hits.
The white kids I was sitting with were friends,
at least as I defined a friend back then.
So wait, said Nick, does your mom wear a dot?
I nodded, and I caught a smirk on Todd—
She wear it to the shower? And to bed?—
while Jesse sucked his chocolate milk and Brad
was getting ready for another stab.
I said, Hand me that ketchup packet there.
And Nick said, What? I snatched it, twitched the tear,
and squeezed a dollop on my thumb and worked
circles till the red planet entered the house of war
and on my forehead for the world to see
my third eye burned those schoolboys in their seats,
their flesh in little puddles underneath,
pale pools where Nataraja cooled his feet.
 
 
Ode to a Drone
 
Hell-raiser, razor-feathered
riser, windhover over
Peshawar,
 
power’s
joystick-blithe
thousand-mile scythe,

proxy executioner’s
proxy ax
pinged by a proxy server,

winged victory,
pilot cipher
unburdened by aught

but fuel and bombs,
fool of God, savage
idiot savant
 
sucking your benumbed
trigger-finger
gamer’s thumb
 
 
His Love of Semicolons
 
The comma is comely, the period, peerless,
but stack them one atop
the other, and I am in love; what I love
is the end that refuses to stop,
the promise that something will come in a moment
though the saying seem all said;
a grammatical afterlife, fullness that spills
past the full stop, not so much dead
as taking a breather, at worst, stunned;
the sentence regroups and restarts,
its notation bespeaking momentum, its silence
dividing the beats of a heart;

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1101947098
• ISBN 13: 9781101947098
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120