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Dothead: Poems
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 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.
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 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.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2016
3 people are currently reading
192 people want to read
About the author
Amit Majmudar
33 books106 followersAmit Majmudar is the author of The Abundance, Partitions, chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best debut novels of 2011 and by Booklist as one of the year’s ten best works of historical fiction. His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Best American Poetry 2011. A radiologist, he lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
June 8, 2016
I gave this book the top rating based on a few poems which I really liked, but then it's unusual to find a book a poetry in which all the poems are equally well written. Nice work.
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August 29, 2016"One of the best poems, 'Interrogation,' serves as an example of what Majmudar does best. Written in rhyming couplets, the poem narrates a torture session, providing just enough detail to make the reader wince. The poem is bearable because of oblique imagery and the restraint of the form, creating a kind of 'braced pain.'"- Fred Dings
This book was reviewed in the September/October 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
This book was reviewed in the September/October 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
May 27, 2016
I finished, but I already want to reread. So many moments of blossoming, recognition of the known and unrecognized.
July 8, 2016
3.75 stars. There were a number of poems in this collection I read more than once.
August 13, 2024
"I had been a vulture just ten years when I looked down and saw Karbala set for me like a table."
October 26, 2017
Well, this was a pretty crazy trip.
Some of the poetry was remarkable. Some of it was mediocre. Some of it was riveting, some of it was boring - but, that said, what was great was perfection, and what wasn't was still okay. This collection forced me to say the words: "I really love Crocodile Porn" so it has some inherent value. "Abecedarian" was Majmudar's epic here, a sex-infused look into the differences between men and women, and it was wonderful.
Highly recommend, with the caveat that some of the poems won't engage readers.
Some of the poetry was remarkable. Some of it was mediocre. Some of it was riveting, some of it was boring - but, that said, what was great was perfection, and what wasn't was still okay. This collection forced me to say the words: "I really love Crocodile Porn" so it has some inherent value. "Abecedarian" was Majmudar's epic here, a sex-infused look into the differences between men and women, and it was wonderful.
Highly recommend, with the caveat that some of the poems won't engage readers.
August 29, 2022
Come for the play, stay for the passion
There is serious wordplay and sound-play in Amit Majmudar’s Dothead, a collection of poems that is informed by form, but not constrained by it. The effect, however, is not of a series of intellectual games (at least, not most of the time: sometimes the playfulness, as in “Augustine the Hippo” is uppermost). More often, the bravura surface is the bubble-wrap that keeps readers from being scared off by the sharp edges of the poems’ content. There is the immigrant’s alienation at having his family’s culture laughed at by fellow students in “Dothead” or at being singled out every time for pat-downs at the airport in “T.S.A.”; his fierce indignation at the bloody history of colonialism in India in “Dynasty,” at state-sanctioned torture in “Training Course” and “The Interrogation,” or at America’s shameful use-and-discard attitude toward wounded veterans in “Welcome Home, Troops!” But there is also the painful mix of grief and love in poems about a son, “The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up,” and about dead or dying poets he admires (“To Anne Sexton” and “Steep Ascension,” about his meeting with John Hollander in a hospital). His “Abecedarian” is not a typical abecedarian poem in which each line starts with a different letter of the alphabet consecutively, but a sequence of 26 prose poems, running from A to Z, about the origins of oral sex in the Garden of Eden. Whatever poems you may have read about oral sex before, trust me, this is different: startling, funny, satirical, self-questioning. Majmudar has a similarly rueful/knowing take on sex and the teenage boy in his “James Bond Suite.”
Majmudar’s poems are not designed to make readers comfortable. Like many poets who are members of a group that is regularly seen as “other”—misinterpreted, stereotyped, condescended to—he forces readers to confront their own assumptions and self-exculpatory reactions. He deliberately interweaves the forms and subjects of Western culture with those of non-Western cultures, as in his skinny sestina “The Waltz of Descartes and Mohammed” or in his sonzals, a combination of the Western sonnet with the Arabic ghazal (which flourished also in India, Pakistan, Persia, and elsewhere), such as “Taste Bud Sonzal” and “Pattern and Snarl.” This wire is live; grab it if you dare.
There is serious wordplay and sound-play in Amit Majmudar’s Dothead, a collection of poems that is informed by form, but not constrained by it. The effect, however, is not of a series of intellectual games (at least, not most of the time: sometimes the playfulness, as in “Augustine the Hippo” is uppermost). More often, the bravura surface is the bubble-wrap that keeps readers from being scared off by the sharp edges of the poems’ content. There is the immigrant’s alienation at having his family’s culture laughed at by fellow students in “Dothead” or at being singled out every time for pat-downs at the airport in “T.S.A.”; his fierce indignation at the bloody history of colonialism in India in “Dynasty,” at state-sanctioned torture in “Training Course” and “The Interrogation,” or at America’s shameful use-and-discard attitude toward wounded veterans in “Welcome Home, Troops!” But there is also the painful mix of grief and love in poems about a son, “The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up,” and about dead or dying poets he admires (“To Anne Sexton” and “Steep Ascension,” about his meeting with John Hollander in a hospital). His “Abecedarian” is not a typical abecedarian poem in which each line starts with a different letter of the alphabet consecutively, but a sequence of 26 prose poems, running from A to Z, about the origins of oral sex in the Garden of Eden. Whatever poems you may have read about oral sex before, trust me, this is different: startling, funny, satirical, self-questioning. Majmudar has a similarly rueful/knowing take on sex and the teenage boy in his “James Bond Suite.”
Majmudar’s poems are not designed to make readers comfortable. Like many poets who are members of a group that is regularly seen as “other”—misinterpreted, stereotyped, condescended to—he forces readers to confront their own assumptions and self-exculpatory reactions. He deliberately interweaves the forms and subjects of Western culture with those of non-Western cultures, as in his skinny sestina “The Waltz of Descartes and Mohammed” or in his sonzals, a combination of the Western sonnet with the Arabic ghazal (which flourished also in India, Pakistan, Persia, and elsewhere), such as “Taste Bud Sonzal” and “Pattern and Snarl.” This wire is live; grab it if you dare.
January 9, 2024
I bought this book almost at random, having seen one of Majmudar’s published poems elsewhere, and for anyone who enjoys a very musical formalist poet, Majmudar will not disappoint.
There’s not a ton of esoteric allusions in Dothead, but there’s a fair bit of literary history, so if you’ve got a bit of background on canonical 20th-century authors, particularly the modernists, Dothead will provide some extra oomph. For instance, in his “James Bond Suite,” I thought I saw direct ties to Hemingway (“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”) and Yeats (“Easter 1916”) tied very cleverly into standard James Bond tropes. Likewise, Majmudar seems particularly enamored of the First World War and Wilfred Owen, two of my own personal favorites. Majmudar’s “Love Song for Doomed Youth” in particular seems like a tribute. Plus, I suspect Majmudar got his penchant for full consonant rhymes from Owen. One example is the haunting “Steep Ascension,” a poem done in tercets whose first stanza chimes on will/well/wall.
Dothead is filled with innovation metrical decisions like that. Most are quite beautiful, although sometimes the poet’s delight in wordplay doesn’t always seem quite appropriate to the theme. Politically, the poems are about what you’d expect – the poem “T.S.A.” (about going through airport security) is wonderfully musical, but the basic idea, while not untrue, has become trite.
Still, with these minor criticisms out the way, I deeply enjoyed Dothead, especially its title poem (“Dothead”); several metrically innovative poems like the aforementioned “Steep Ascension”; and the clever “Augustine the Hippo.” Plus, since I’m always partial to odes to punctuation, everyone should check out “His Love of Semicolons.”
There’s not a ton of esoteric allusions in Dothead, but there’s a fair bit of literary history, so if you’ve got a bit of background on canonical 20th-century authors, particularly the modernists, Dothead will provide some extra oomph. For instance, in his “James Bond Suite,” I thought I saw direct ties to Hemingway (“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”) and Yeats (“Easter 1916”) tied very cleverly into standard James Bond tropes. Likewise, Majmudar seems particularly enamored of the First World War and Wilfred Owen, two of my own personal favorites. Majmudar’s “Love Song for Doomed Youth” in particular seems like a tribute. Plus, I suspect Majmudar got his penchant for full consonant rhymes from Owen. One example is the haunting “Steep Ascension,” a poem done in tercets whose first stanza chimes on will/well/wall.
Dothead is filled with innovation metrical decisions like that. Most are quite beautiful, although sometimes the poet’s delight in wordplay doesn’t always seem quite appropriate to the theme. Politically, the poems are about what you’d expect – the poem “T.S.A.” (about going through airport security) is wonderfully musical, but the basic idea, while not untrue, has become trite.
Still, with these minor criticisms out the way, I deeply enjoyed Dothead, especially its title poem (“Dothead”); several metrically innovative poems like the aforementioned “Steep Ascension”; and the clever “Augustine the Hippo.” Plus, since I’m always partial to odes to punctuation, everyone should check out “His Love of Semicolons.”
September 1, 2025
My favorites: Ode to a Drone, Killshot, His Love of Semicolons, Rune Poem, Horse Apocalypse, Abecedarian, Sex, Lineage, Are You Hungry?, Dystopiary, Logomachia, Rimbaud in Harar, From the Egg
Poems like Ode to a Drone, I liked because they are short, snappy, rhythmic and playful, but also meaningful. Poems like Killshot, Lineage, and Dystopiary feel especially emphatic (pleading?) and powerful. Abecedarian and Logomachia are longer conceptual pieces that challenge me and present unexpected connections. If I had to pick only one exceptional piece from this book, it would be Abecadarian.
A lot of the poems that didn't make this list were moving to me on a topical level, and I really wanted to like them -- but for word choice, style, or other reasons, they weren't as strong or engaging.
For example, the titular poem Dothead had what I felt was clunky, forced rhyming, i.e.
is not the treasure, but as good as treasure --
All right. What I said wasn't half so measured.
I feel there was a bit of unevenness in this book, with the best poems greatly outshining the others. Those poems make me want to revisit it and thus bump it from 3 to 4 stars.
Poems like Ode to a Drone, I liked because they are short, snappy, rhythmic and playful, but also meaningful. Poems like Killshot, Lineage, and Dystopiary feel especially emphatic (pleading?) and powerful. Abecedarian and Logomachia are longer conceptual pieces that challenge me and present unexpected connections. If I had to pick only one exceptional piece from this book, it would be Abecadarian.
A lot of the poems that didn't make this list were moving to me on a topical level, and I really wanted to like them -- but for word choice, style, or other reasons, they weren't as strong or engaging.
For example, the titular poem Dothead had what I felt was clunky, forced rhyming, i.e.
is not the treasure, but as good as treasure --
All right. What I said wasn't half so measured.
I feel there was a bit of unevenness in this book, with the best poems greatly outshining the others. Those poems make me want to revisit it and thus bump it from 3 to 4 stars.
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August 22, 2022Dothead covers some intense territory. Faith runs across its pages, from beginning to end: Majmudar's grandfather, illuminator of Qur'ans; Adam and Eve and the serpent; Eden and Eden fallen. There is belief and disbelief in systems and in governments, and a demand for something better. (Our children deserve so much more than this fealty to guns and to drones.) Majmudar doesn't shy away from the ugliness of racism or the horrors of war and history (and the present). And somehow it's funny and beautiful anyway.
My full review: https://essentiallyanerd.wordpress.co...
My full review: https://essentiallyanerd.wordpress.co...
February 24, 2018
I can't explain why I like this passage, and others like it, so much: "The blackberries in the Dutch painter Jan van Os's still life / Cause ants to abandon genuine grains of sugar / And head single file for the wall: / Look up 'Van Os Ants' on YouTube if you don't believe me."
My delight was somewhat diminished when I could not, in fact, find this on YouTube or the web. Still, great poems.
My delight was somewhat diminished when I could not, in fact, find this on YouTube or the web. Still, great poems.
September 24, 2018
If you don’t pay attention this collection you are missing out on some profound almost deep thoughts. It is not classic existential poetry but it gives you pause and more to work with than Instagram or Twitter style poetry. It is good but some of it is obvious others more profound. It a 5 because it is accessible and an interesting read.
January 13, 2019
Dothead is a good collection of poems that tries to do too much. There's no cohesive theme that binds the collection together, which saddens me because Majmudar has some serious talent when discussing the Indian-American experience. That's showcased in the title poem, which is one of the best of the whole book.
June 8, 2019
The title and cover made this book seem far more interesting and political than it was. So many of the poems felt like filler, and some sounded like responses to creative writing prompts.
The Abcedarian was the one poem that got kind of interesting for me. For that poem alone I might hold onto this for a while.
The Abcedarian was the one poem that got kind of interesting for me. For that poem alone I might hold onto this for a while.
March 27, 2021
A visceral, unsparing collection that reminded me of Daniel Borzutzky in its sardonic appropriation of both images of violence and the language of violence, like some of the best literature it succeeds at re-sensitizing the reader to the actual terror of physical pain and the horror of human cruelty. But Majmudar is also one of the most linguistically agile contemporary poets I have encountered, copiously troping his way through a blizzard of puns and verbal transmogrifications.
September 8, 2018
Wow. This man went from writing one of my favorite books this year to one of my least favorites.
After three or four pages the extended ode to the BJ sort of lost it's charm. Just a little.
God this sucked. So misleading.
After three or four pages the extended ode to the BJ sort of lost it's charm. Just a little.
God this sucked. So misleading.
did-not-finish
March 3, 2020Reminder.
I couldn't remember why I gave up on this when I started reading it a few years back and I didn't have a did-not-finish tag. It became blatantly apparent partway in. The ode to the blowjob was irritating enough but I couldn't continue after a scene of abuse/sexual assault.
I couldn't remember why I gave up on this when I started reading it a few years back and I didn't have a did-not-finish tag. It became blatantly apparent partway in. The ode to the blowjob was irritating enough but I couldn't continue after a scene of abuse/sexual assault.
January 29, 2022
I loved these poems. They crackle with wit. They know literature. They know medicine. They know technology. They know entertainment culture. They made me laugh, often. And sometimes wince as they hit close to home.
March 19, 2023
Disappointing. Majmudar gives a good interview but most of these poems were not for me (many, I suspect, are not a great fit for women in general, but I could be wrong; poetic trends don't often resonate with me).
July 4, 2023
Amit’s inventiveness adds freshness and a new poetic texture to the field of contemporary American poetry. He gives us his perspective as an Indian American, as a doctor, and as an observer to his myriad, wild imaginings. Smart and sharp, “Dothead” gives a collection worth reading.
July 16, 2018
Not the poetry my soul needed
August 28, 2018
Really beautiful. My favorite poem was “Abecedarian”
October 23, 2018
A sure and captivating poet, able to work successfully in many styles and adept at handling many themes, from the whimsical to the tragic.
December 27, 2019
I was equally astonished by the poet's audacious theology and metaphysics as by his bravura use of language.
August 27, 2020
I would have given this collection five stars, but the whole section about blowjobs (and non-consensual blowjobs?) really put me off.
May 20, 2021
Really enjoyed this collection. Some of the poems made me giggle, some made me absolutely writhe in discomfort. The emotional range was fantastic. And who can’t appreciate a poem about punctuation?
February 2, 2022
3.5 approx. serious talent i can appreciate but maybe i am not in a good place mentally to read an abundance of adam and eve metaphorical poems for getting sloppy toppy
January 7, 2023
If you’re a devout Christian don’t read this. If you’re up for a little freaky deeky in Eden. This is for YOU.
December 14, 2023
Brilliant, modern poetry that encompasses multiple styles and stark references. Respect for this author.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews