Open Mouths

by Sharan Hunjan

In Open Mouths Sharan Hunjan presents a vision of a world simultaneously familiar and strikingly strange. The quotidian, the domestic, the commonplace are interrogated and manipulated through the poet's eye for detail, linguistic sense of play and restless imaginative and philosophical impulses. The short-comings of language, the gulf between words and meaning, between experi-ence and description, the space between translation, between places, between generations-these are the problems with which Hunjan grapples. Full of seemingly quiet, yet startlingly profound thought, razor-sharp word-play, raw emotion and dazzling image and phrase-making, Open Mouths marks the emergence of another stellar talent from the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE stable.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Reviews

[Sabiha Younus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bought this from the aggressively leftist Wexner Arts Center bookstore on Ohio State campus. I loved the store and its selection of indiepub books. I was enchanted by the double-flap cover, and I knew that I would enjoy some of the poems (despite not being a very good poetry reader generally) from flipping through and catching pretty sentences. I ended up really, really loving several and I think I’m starting to understand my taste in poetry. Always happy to support a leftist desi Muslim poetess. <3

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“When things fall apart you wake up & realise you fell / asleep under midday sun & it lied — / it burned you anyway. // When things fall apart you don't want to kiss / or hear your baby’s / laugh. // When things fall, a / part of you / runs.” Sharan Hunjan’s debut poetry collection Open Mouths, which comes after her success as part of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE collective, is a beautiful, often dreamlike book of poems about parenthood, everyday life, labour both capitalistic and domestic, and the various boundaries real and imagined of the human body. Many of the poems bristle with knowing humour: “‘cause I'm a pariah in my own bungalow / in my pyjamas eating basmati & daal / sitting in my yoga pose / with my chakras all aligned — // & when I’m out let’s say Namaste”. There’s ‘Feed’, which is about both the feeding that keeps our young alive and the digital feed that saps us too: “tomorrow/time/now is crumpled // SCROLL FURTHER // jealousy is bright electrical currents”; “FEED // never ends like the deep of night when a beast is ravenous at your breast”. There’s ‘Grenade’, in which the devouring of a pomegranate becomes something violent and macabre, wryly paraphrasing a line from Macbeth for good measure: “I chuck the hollow carcasses in the bin: two hard skins, a severed head (or heart). / Who would've thought the old fruit to have had so much blood in it. / Wiping away all splashes — fridge, toaster, floor — the knife / sits in a pool of red bloated in the sink.” I enjoyed the animalistic poems, like ‘Wolf Mother’ and ‘Heron’ (as a self-professed heron obsessive, I got a lot of joy out of its final lines, “Perched is the heron — a distant owner — / its thin leg stuck like a pin.” And I loved the luminous ‘Luna’, right from its dazzling compound opener, “Moonblind, I run weighing up the cruelty of being loved.” An exquisite book — and exquisitely designed (as always with Rough Trade Books) by Office Of Craig.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sat down today to read a few pages of this and ended up reading the whole thing cover to cover. It was so beautiful, such original poetry. My favourite poem was Scrambled Eggs. I think it'll stay with me for a long time.