In this third collection of poems, Prageeta Sharma writes of the experiences of a class-displaced, first-generation Hindoo Romantic, and her landscapes and language follow cannily and whimsically from that position.
An exploration of the compatibility of human desire with personal ethics is at the heart of Infamous Landscapes, whose voices work both with and against a perceived Wordsworthian innocence. In these poems Sharma turns away from Romanticism with a certain disconcerted, feminine shame, one that finds her peering through an enculturated, gendered lens. The landscapes of these poems are urban and, “natural,” inasmuch as Sharma's third, runs an emotional gamut from fear to fervor in a landscape both external and internal, cast in hysterics and hermeneutics. “Next, I pull down that lonely flag./Why was it waving at you?”
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PRAGEETA SHARMA was born in Framingham, Massachusetts. She is the author of Bliss to Fill (2000) and The Opening Question, which was selected for the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Series by Peter Gizzi. She is the director of the Creative Writing Program at University of Montana in Missoula.
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