Love in a Time of Technology

Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize, Best Book of Poetry, 2014

Whether in the heart of downtown Toronto, a bookstore in Boston, the courtyard of the Taj Mahal–through the portals of cyberspace–on the banks of a Tampa river, or a journey through time to Georgetown, an old colonial capital, love circumscribes everything. But this book is no wide-eyed outpouring; it probes and questions concepts and beliefs, pokes fun at age, companions taken for granted, and the realization that, like a mannequin in a Manhattan storefront, love is “faceless and, almost, raceless.” If love circumscribes everything, these poems show that everything–economics, politics, ambitions and exiles–also circumscribes love.

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

“[T]he poet’s mastery of the English language is underwritten by ancestral histories and myths. Love is age-old and universal . . . Persaud is a poet of precise language, of the finely-honed meaning . . .” —Wasafiri

“Persaud’s poems are spiced with the imagery of his ancestral India–Hindu gods, rituals, lavish epics, and seductive flowers . . . Persaud seems both haunted and inspired by the notion that America shelters so few who have any true ancestral claim to the place . . . Reading Persaud’s verse, it’s hard not to feel, and in any way be heartened by, the sense that each one of us is, in one way or another, an exile.” —Bostonia