One Man Two Executions – Arjun Rajendran

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In his latest poetry collection, Arjun Rajendran begins by resurrecting voices and stories from 18th century Pondicherry: of a French ship that must change its flag to render itself invisible to the English fleet, of blind men contemplating a lunar eclipse or an unfortunate condemned to the absurdity of a second execution. Then jumping across centuries, the other two sections in this book explore intimacy, travel, hauntings and generational angst. Arjun Rajendran’s new poems have a huge appetite and a magnificent ambition. Here, the spectres of the past are given flesh and blood and begin to live again. They are not marionettes against a backdrop but living people and like living people they infiltrate your memory and stain your consciousness, leaving strange odours: durian, gunpowder and hypocrisy in your nose. – Jerry PintoArjun Rajendran writes a poetry of genuine surprise and reinvention, soldering together the most far-flung elements of experience into a compelling lyric unity. The historical fragment, the topically political, the shared cultural and the minutely personal — all of these are transformed by his acute metaphorical vision. – Anjum HasanExperimental and inquisitive, these are poems that demand an imagination where ‘Dravidian’ is struck out for ‘Darwinian’ and ‘whale’ replaced by ‘while’, time becoming space like it does on a clockface. – Sumana Roy