Blind Screens

Description

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Film. Winner of the 2016 Almost Island Manuscript Competition, judged by Adil Jussawalla and Eliot Weinberger.

"Ranjani Murali's is a fast-moving eye, missing nothing, sparing nothing. Every detail of the seen world is here, which is at once both the absurdity and the dis-ease of our represented and re-represented lives, troubled by the position of privilege in which we all 'reek of watching.' With a mind 'suspended // between seeing and being seen' the poet guides us through a kind of underworld, urgently crisscrossing the hyper-real of cinema and self-deception in a global theater in which any one of us might 'step out into the raw / brick temple, rain-shorn, and bow in reverence / to an abscess adorned with flower;' where 'the hero is smoking in / the trailer-toilet, his window overlooking a river where / a buffalo is courting storm-water;' and the Supreme-Mother-Goddess is 'a myth so real that / it makes you pause at every corner and turn furtively back, // wondering if she is tailing you.' Under Murali's cool urbanity, her unshakable irony and equanimity, runs a line of anger that feels exactly like a line of clarity."—Susan Tichy

"Ranjani Murali's lines are usually triggered by immediate experience or by an experience intentionally recollected to stress its immediacy: what actually happened, what body and mind experienced at a particular time... Considering the range of subjects she covers, the risks Murali takes are many, and skilfully faced. Her subjects are starkly contemporary: terrorists, abandoned Alcatraz, Tamil movies, sexual harassment—our daily newsfeed, but which, in her world, are also tropes of entrapment. Her escapes or attempts to escape are through real or imaginary flight: the sky's her saviour."—Adil Jussawalla

Author Bio