Echo in Four Beats

by Rita Banerjee

Combining elements, rhythms, and personas from American jazz, blues, and ragtime, poet Rita Banerjee presents a modern-day spin on the love story of Echo and Narcissus in her debut full-length poetry collection, Echo in Four Beats. But in this story, told in four parts, Echo is more than just a fragment, she is a Sapphic voice that speaks, foretells, forestalls, and repeats. Echo in Four Beats was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, the Three Mile Harbor Book Prize, the Aquarius Press/Willow Books Literature Award.

90 pages, Paperback

Published March 9, 2018

About the author

Rita Banerjee is editor of Disobedient Futures (University Press of Kentucky, May 2027) and the author of the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats, which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018,” and Cracklers at Night. She is also editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and serves as Senior Editor of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Sign & Breath: Voice and the Literary Tradition, Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir, and one of the opening chapters of this new memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays, and another chapter from her new memoir, “The Female Gaze,” was a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. You can follow her work at ritabanerjee.com.

Reviews

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats is a positive book. It is a book about positivity. It is a book about attraction. As much as it reflects the complex curiosities of the poet herself, this short, four-part poetry collection also reflects the curious ways extremely otherly and othered objects and cultures carry capacity and phenomenological connection with one another. East to West. The ancients to the contemporaries. Language and translation. These juxtapositions are arrived with Banerjee’s poetic presence, not quite lyrical, not quite narrative, not quite conceptual, which provides appropriate spaces and ranges to explore rather fully a world of integration.

(Review continues at Yellow Rabbits: http://yellowrabbits.weebly.com/)