The essays, together with a detailed Introduction and Postscript, broadly focus on the question of poetry. Wide ranging in their references, and written in a lyrical and inviting style, the
writings engage with a host of political questions relating to nation, language, translation, borders, gender, sexuality, and more.
How can an individual poet define her own voice in the face of the overwhelming presence of earlier, often dead, poets' voices? What connect our 'new' postcolonial, transnational anxieties to
the rampant celebrations of cruelty and torture that have always been the subject of poetry from humankind's earliest epics? Is poetry the antithesis of terror or is it terror's very
essence?
While grappling with these questions, the underlying premise is that poems, even the most apparently everyday ones, are texts of crisis; they are our first language when confronted with the
incomprehensible, with sublime joy, or with terror out of the sky.
