LOST, HURT, OR IN TRANSIT BEAUTIFUL

“In Rohan Chhetri’s Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful,? inherited literary forms― the ode, the lyric, and pristine tercets― are juxtaposed with gorgeously fractured and stylistically daring hybrid pieces. The end result is a work in which poetic technique is brought to bear on lingering questions of identity, artistic tradition, and the cruelty implicit in language itself. Here, form, grammar, and syntax function as a kind of containment, but also, a ‘ruined field’ that is rife with possibility. Chhetri dramatizes and resists the ways language, and its implicit logic, limit what is possible within our most solitary reflections, defining even those ‘vague dreams’ that in the end we greet alone. ‘This is how violence enters / a poem,’ he explains, ‘through a screen / door crawling out & Mother asleep on the couch.’ These pieces are as lyrical as they are grounded, and as understated as they are ambitious. ‘In my language, there is a name for this music,’ he tells us. As his stunning collection unfolds, Chhetri reminds us, with subtlety and grace, that the smallest stylistic decisions in poetry are politically charged. This is a haunting book.”
―from the Judge’s Citation by Kristina Marie Darling

Rohan Chhetri is a poet based in Houston, TX. He is the author of the collection SLOW STARTLE (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2016), and the chapbook Jurassic Desire (Per Diem Press, 2017). This second full collection is the winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize and is published in India by HarperCollins and in the United States by Tupelo Press.