The Gallery of Upside Down Women

Arundhathi Subramaniam (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

112 Seiten

2025 | Paperback original
Bloodaxe Books Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-78037-743-8 (ISBN)

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Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women – women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down. Leaping from the past into a global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain one’s spine through life’s giddiest rollercoaster rides. Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to ‘gatecrash into the present’, how to ‘go skinny-dipping in the self’. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom. Arundhathi Subramaniam has published five collections in India and three books with Bloodaxe in the UK including When God Is a Traveller (2014), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Love Without a Story (2020). Her earlier work is available in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009). She has published other books on Buddhism and spiritual figures.

Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. She has published four books of poetry in the UK with Bloodaxe: Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009), which combines selections from her first two Indian collections, On Cleaning Book-shelves and Where I Live, with new work; When God Is a Traveller (2014), a Poetry Book Society Choice, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry (awarded by India’s national academy of letters), the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize at the Jaipur Literary Festival, and the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy; Love Without a Story (2020); and The Gallery of Upside Down Women (2025). Her recent work includes Women Who Wear Only Themselves: Four Travelers on Their Sacred Journeys (Harper Collins, US, 2025) and Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry (Penguin Books India, 2024). Previous books include The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005), and the biography, Sadhguru: More Than a Life (Penguin, 2010), as well as Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry (Penguin, 2014). In 2006 she appeared at London’s Poetry International festival and gave readings throughout Britain on a tour organised by the Poetry Society. She also took part in the T.S. Eliot Prize reading at London’s Southbank Centre in 2015. She mostly lives in Mumbai, Chennai and New York.

9 Author’s note

Cycling Hands Free on Air
15 The World Takes a Breath
17 Staying Unnamed
19 The Marketplace of Poets
21 The Breaking News Lullaby
24 Masks Off
26 The Great Mother
28 Grant a Woman Her Fifties
30 This Fruit
32 The Hand
34 The World Breaks
36 And Suddenly It’s Evening
38 The Tailor
40 The Women No Longer Wait
43 Another Way to Stop Waiting
45 What Stories are Left
47 Patachara Awakens

The Gallery of Upside Down Women
53 That Girl from Karaikkal
56 The Truth-speaker’s Word Doesn’t Change
59 Where the Yoginis Wear No Heads
62 Questions for Akka Mahadevi
64 Unstained by White
68 The Maker of Indigo Poems

God’s Forgotten Nickname
75 The Idol Worshipper’s Song
76 The Idolater’s Way
78 God’s Forgotten Nickname
81 Nothing Is Singular
83 What Do You Do with the Moon in Urdu Poetry?
86 Just in Case
87 Forgiving Teachers
89 Some Names Take Time
92 The Dog in the Manhattan Elevator
94 Some Said He Looked Like James Dean
96 When Two Women Drink Chai Together
98 Consecration
100 Tips for Growing Up
104 The Crone
106 Creation Story

111 Acknowledgements

Erscheinungsdatum	29.04.2025
Verlagsort	Tyne and Wear
Sprache	englisch
Maße	138 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Lyrik / Gedichte
ISBN-10	1-78037-743-6 / 1780377436
ISBN-13	978-1-78037-743-8 / 9781780377438
Zustand	Neuware