Mattress Makers

Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize, Best Overall Book of Poetry, 2023

Persaud’s new collection celebrates the music in the seemingly mundane. Imbued with a deeply philosophical consciousness, and the questioning spirit of the ancients, it engages in the pleasures of technology, while ever cognizant of its drawbacks in its assault on the personal. As always, with this poet, there is an Upanishadic, yogic, and quantum search for truth and the essence of reality–the ancient Indian concepts of multiplicity, multipresence, and simultaneous existences finding support in cutting-edge quantum physics. The poems therefore flip on themselves, move in a blink from place to place, from time to time, from existence to existence. They delve into ancestries and the movement and intertwining of peoples, cultures, plants, animals, cuisines, languages, loves and the passing of eras. Love and the exuberance in the world around–centered in the Florida land-(and sea-) scape–permeates this work.

AUTHOR

Sasenarine Persaud

Sasenarine Persaud is a Guyana-born Canadian American author of Indian ancestry and originator of the term “Yogic Realism.” He has published essays in Critical Practice (New Delhi), World Literature Today (Oklahoma), and Brick (Toronto) on this subject. His lifelong engagement with Indian philosophies, art, and languages and an awareness of his community’s 184 years domicile in the Americas, clearly distinguishes his craft.

Persaud is the author of 15 books of prose and poetry, including Canada Geese and Apple Chatney (stories), the title story of which is anthologized on both sides of the Atlantic and included in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, An Anthology of Colonial and Postcolonial Short Fiction, and the Journey Prize Anthology: Short Fiction from the Best of Canada’s New Writers; two ground-breaking novels, Dear Death and The Ghost of Bellow’s Man, and his signature, raga-infused poetry collection, A Surf of Sparrows’ Songs, which alternates between Miami, Toronto, Guyana’s Atlantic coast and India. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies including The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.

Reviews

“Persaud’s voice draws out the experiences of being human, and if readers allow themselves to be embodied by the collision of images and thoughts, by poems that seem to give rise to emotion in advance of meaning, they are sure to be rewarded with surprise, and, at times, with glimpses of the ineffable.” —Malahat Review

“… another must-read collection by Persaud.” —Khaas Baat

“Mattress Makers is a significant collection. Ambitious in its sweep and inclusivity, attentive to all manner of small and large ideas. It is a book to reread over and over again.” —Caribbean Voice