Where I Live

Where I Live combines Arundhathi Subramaniam's first two Indian collections of poetry, On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live, with a selection of new work. Her poems explore various ambivalences around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megalopolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey. They probe contradictory impulses: the desire for adventure and anchorage; expansion and containment; vulnerability and strength; freedom and belonging; withdrawal and engagement; an approach to language as exciting resource and desperate refuge. Her new poems are a meditation on desire in which the sensual and sacred mingle inextricably. There is a fascination with the skins that separate self from other, self from self, thing from no-thing. These are poems of dark need, of urgency, of desire as derailment, and derailment as possibility. 'This is writing that creeps up on the reader...