Dothead
Poems
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A captivating, no-holds-barred collection of new poems from an acclaimed poet and novelist with a fierce and original voice
Dothead is an exploration of selfhood both intense and exhilarating. Within the first pages, Amit Majmudar asserts the claims of both the self and the other: the title poem shows us the place of an Indian American teenager in the bland surround of a mostly white peer group, partaking of imagery from the poet’s Hindu tradition; the very next poem is a fanciful autobiography, relying for its imagery on the religious tradition of Islam. From poems about the treatment at the airport of people who look like Majmudar (“my dark unshaven brothers / whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends”) to a long, freewheeling abecedarian poem about Adam and Eve and the discovery of oral sex, Dothead is a profoundly satisfying cultural critique and a thrilling experiment in language. United across a wide range of tones and forms, the poems inhabit and explode multiple perspectives, finding beauty in every one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With the ghosts of the motherland, along with the sins of the father, unafraid to cross oceans or centuries, Majmudar (The Abundance: A Novel), a poet, novelist, and radiologist, ponders how much of a person's identity is influenced by environment and how much is defined by nature. Aided by his unforgiving eye and a seemingly effortless ability to electrify his images, he composes a portrait of humankind that exposes its overreliance on the persuasive strength of fear. For example, the collection's title poem finds Majmudar exploring early feelings of otherness when thrown against a whitewashed monolith. The white kids tease the young speaker about his Indian background, specifically his mother wearing a bindi. In retaliation, he takes ketchup and applies a makeshift bindi to his forehead: "the red planet entered the house of war/ and on my forehead for the world to see/ my third eye burned those schoolboys in their seats." He deviates from his usual character sketches to play with forms both common (sonnet, elegy) and unusual (abecedarian), even combining a sonnet and ghazal into a "sonzal." But throughout Majmudar keeps focused on one task: exposing what he views as the hollow American claims to being a "melting pot," as only those who appease the fickle identity of an American are guaranteed their own freedom.
