Annus Horribilis: Poems (Paperback)  | Released: 28 Feb 2021

A STANDOUT DEBUT COLLECTION OF POETRYAnnus Horribilis is concerned with the violence of thinking, alone. The voices in these poems move through relationships, family, friendship, external disintegration, the labour of loving, being loved and of caring, where they are constantly confronted with the familiar turning foreign, the quotidian becoming a scene of absolute hostility, and where a word otherwise spoken easily becomes incommunicable. The book grapples with a (habitually futile) desire to communicate what should only be communicable-looking for some friend in language-that won't lead to misunderstanding or, worse, silence. It searches for a language in which thought might survive and perhaps even reach out towards others. Review The voice in these poems is bewitched, hallucinatory and wise. Skimming a landscape we know from dreams or nightmares, where everything is familiar but mystifying, where "nerve birds / choking on corks of blood" circle above dread towns and silence. Here is prophecy. Here is poetry returned to us from the future. -- Jeet ThayilUrgent, vital, assured . . . it's hard to find the right words to describe a first collection that's so alert to surprise and the effects of surprise. Avinab Datta-Areng's lines have sprung from the hard rock of loss and their flows, even when they twist and turn through the darkest of caverns, both brace and heal. I'm greatly impressed. -- Adil Jussawalla About the Author Avinab Datta-Areng currently lives in Goa. He's been a recipient of the Charles Pick fellowship and the Vijay Nambisan fellowship. He's also the editor ofnether. This is his first book.