Freshness of the Child (Inscribed)

Paperback - clean, clean cover, no marks - from private collection - The poems contained in this book are replete with imagery and metaphors that are simultaneously cosmopolitan, somatically-anchored, and utterly surreal. One moment the author mentions an ancient harp from Athens, the orange cacophony of streets in New Delhi, hundred proof Jamaican rum, and a merchant from Basra who owns seven camels and thirty goats. The next minute he evokes six-handed Hindu gods, the real distinction between silver and mercury, and a frog's sense of his own identity. The author introduces us to an Italian meat supplier who has slept with seventy two (or more) women, a Pakistani adulteress who specializes in Cuban cuisine, and an American Jew who blushes at the sight of pregnant women. Deeply connected to the corporeal and the mundane and yet transcending those very boundaries, the author's imagination takes us on a thrilling sojourn of sensual delight, of sharp wit, but above all, of delicious surprise about the human condition. Salman Akhtar comes from a family of renowned poets and writers in India. He is the author of ten collections of poems. Five of these, The Hidden Knot (1985), Conditions (1993), Turned to Light (1998), After Landing (2014), and Blood and Ink (2016) contain his poems in the English language and the other five are in his native Urdu. He is also a prolific contributor to the psychoanalytic literature, having authored or edited eighty-nine books. For his distinguished contributions to psychoanalysis, he received the prestigious Sigourney Award in 2012. A psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and teacher by profession, Dr Akhtar was a Visiting Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School in the early 1990s. Currently, he holds the rank of Professor of Psychiatry at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and Supervising and Training Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He is also a Scholar-in-Residence at the Inter-Act Theater Company in Philadelphia.…