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Slow Startle
Rohan Chhetri's Slow Startle is a collection of poetry. The inaugural winner of the Emerging Poets Prize, the collection was selected by Jeet Thayil (Narcopolis) and represents the best of contemporary poetry from India. Vibrant and haunting, the poems within leave the reader in a still and shimmering wake.
58 pages, Paperback
Expected publication June 15, 22016
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About the author
Rohan Chhetri
8 books8 followersRohan Chhetri is a Nepali-Indian writer and translator. He is the author of LOST, HURT, OR IN TRANSIT BEAUTIFUL (Winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize 2018), JURASSIC DESIRE (Winner of the Per Diem Prize 2017), and SLOW STARTLE (Winner of the Emerging Poets Prize 2015).
He is the co-editor of SHREELA RAY: ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF AN AMERICAN MASTER (Unsung Masters Series, 2021) along with Kazim Ali.
A recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant for translation, his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Revue Europe, AGNI and New England Review, Fulcrum, Rattle, Prelude, The Antigonish Review, and elsewhere. He has received poetry fellowships from the Norman Mailer Centre and Sangam House, and won awards from RædLeaf Poetry India and Toto Funds the Arts.
His writings have also been translated into Greek and French.
He is the co-editor of SHREELA RAY: ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF AN AMERICAN MASTER (Unsung Masters Series, 2021) along with Kazim Ali.
A recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant for translation, his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Revue Europe, AGNI and New England Review, Fulcrum, Rattle, Prelude, The Antigonish Review, and elsewhere. He has received poetry fellowships from the Norman Mailer Centre and Sangam House, and won awards from RædLeaf Poetry India and Toto Funds the Arts.
His writings have also been translated into Greek and French.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 28, 2019
The obscenity of rating books perhaps gains some tasteless degrees when we are concerned with poetry. Yet, without flinching from the format, let me go further and say that till page 32, till the poem titled 'Visitation', I was going for five stars. After that, Chhetri gave us poems that one sort of expects from a debut collection: clever, crafty, though struggling with their own gravitas at times. Which is not to say that what happened between page 33 and 57 was not to my liking. No, not that.. It's just that Chhetri is out-of-this-world for the first half of this collection, and only returns, graciously, to the ground or thereabouts in the last half.
One of my favourites, 'EVERY THING FOR ME IS SOMETHING ELSE', is a prose poem. Chhetri is more interested in narrative-like churn. I'm not using the word narrative qua narrative, as I don't think it applies directly - an example is this poem I mentioned, in which a fugue is built with multiple images, each one referring to another. We see a character progressing through (or circling within) these, but this progress is nothing like that in a narrative sweep. This mode can be seen in multiple poems, in fact.
'RECLAMATION', has the lines 'After his woman he loved married another, / our hero woke up every morning with a little blood / in his mouth' - the narrator talks of a 'hero' here, his brother, but the word is only used ironically. The hero has no redemptions, his character only churning with the settling-in of the pain of heartbreak, which the narrator, rather cruelly, juxtaposes with an image of the face of a drowning man. It is a haunting poem, and establishes, by keeping it unsaid, the distance between the two brothers because of the heartbreak of one. There is mention of the heartbroken one owing some money to the narrator, and I couldn't help gushing at the guile of that line.
One of my favourites, 'EVERY THING FOR ME IS SOMETHING ELSE', is a prose poem. Chhetri is more interested in narrative-like churn. I'm not using the word narrative qua narrative, as I don't think it applies directly - an example is this poem I mentioned, in which a fugue is built with multiple images, each one referring to another. We see a character progressing through (or circling within) these, but this progress is nothing like that in a narrative sweep. This mode can be seen in multiple poems, in fact.
'RECLAMATION', has the lines 'After his woman he loved married another, / our hero woke up every morning with a little blood / in his mouth' - the narrator talks of a 'hero' here, his brother, but the word is only used ironically. The hero has no redemptions, his character only churning with the settling-in of the pain of heartbreak, which the narrator, rather cruelly, juxtaposes with an image of the face of a drowning man. It is a haunting poem, and establishes, by keeping it unsaid, the distance between the two brothers because of the heartbreak of one. There is mention of the heartbroken one owing some money to the narrator, and I couldn't help gushing at the guile of that line.
June 17, 2016
Exceptional and foreboding, these poems transverse the delicate nexus between memories and innerscapes that are found flowing all around us and within us, all at once. Quiet and devastating with their revelations, Chhetri's poems find crevices of insight and honesty rarely seen in contemporary Indian poetry. A must read for all poetry lovers, and a prescription for those who fear poetry.
January 30, 2024
A strong collection of poems, a fresh, neoteric language.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews