Overview

The dreamlike, eerily atmospheric prose poems in this collection interrogate margins and melt points of migrancy. Intensely personal, funny, enchanting, and fantastical, it is at once an ambitious autobiography and a dream book, a diary and a field guide. Here, the hybridity of the form serves both as a device of subversion and as an ocular pointing at space and stars, forests and rivers, rupture and belonging. Here wounds multiply in a potato. The soul can be photographed. A mirror hides in a discarded baguette. A phantomlike empty coat in Bardo becomes a bloated pumpkin. The mood is playful, the tone deliberately whimsical, giving voice to discourses on passage, arrival and the rootlessness of migrant diasporas.

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9781774152010

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Reviews

""Sabyasachi Nag's new, unique prose poetry gives us the truth, pain, and mad splendor of the 'alien'. The Alphabet of Aliens is a cascade of brilliant surreal stories braided with moments of condensed lyricism and concentrated, brutal yet witty, recognition. Nag has created a style that delivers the oft-proclaimed but rarely embraced and expressed fact that the alien is not only a foreigner, an extraterrestrial, but is a symbol, an inner reality, of each of us. What 'alienation' is and what it makes us see, within and around us, is revealed again and again in brilliant poems and their brilliant images, insights, and phrases. Their brilliant music. The Alphabet of Aliens is a book of a marvelous and disturbing experience, of a self's remorseless, exploratory descent into difficult reality, into 'a soundless tree-cave reflecting a trapped sun. And there we stop and realize we are not yet dead; we are here, still breathing.'?"" --A F Moritz, author of Great Silent Ballad ""Sabyasachi Nag's The Alphabet of Aliens opens with the line 'As an alien you are entitled to nothing, ' but this collection of electric prose poems is full to bursting with ants, blood, tea, winter, dragons, tornadoes, mothers, fathers, lions, crows, beetles. He stops at the Insomnia Motel, The Curry Shop, boards the Spice Train looking for his place in the world. 'I was a dream, ' he says. 'Dreams are wishes.' Oh, the dreams that come cascading through the pages of this generous book. There are wonders on every page and crazy delight."" --Barbara Hamby, author of Burn ""The Alphabet of Aliens, prose poems by Sabyasachi Nag, is quite simply, superb. Nag's words teleport, transmute, and inject the reader into the emotional psyche of anyone, everyone, who's ever been an outsider. This is the work of an astute writer. Evoking emotions I suspect we all share and more often than not, try to ignore, or to bury. Both polished and raw, each piece reminds me of a sophisticated, deconstructed meal prepared by a master chef. One who knows better than anyone what works, and how best to present that to showcase judiciously chosen ingredients. This is a book I will reread, and benefit from every time. Kudos to Mawenzi House, and hats off to Sabyasachi Nag. The Alphabet of Aliens is a gift to us all."" --Bill Arnott, author of A Perfect Day for a Walk and A Perfect Day for a Walk by the Water ""Cold and hot at the same time, The Alphabet of Aliens pushes the reader away and pulls the reader in--forcing uncomfortable intimacy with the old, old learning curve of newness that attends the migrant experience. The phonetic is frenetic in Nag's worlds within words. It's playful, and it's painful."" --Chantel Lavoie, author of This Is About Angels, Women, and Men ""The Alphabet of Aliens is a triumph: Songs cast in ecstatic surrealism: You're betwixt 'Strawberry Fields' and 'Desolation Row, ' in that space where Rilke meets Ferlinghetti. And once there, you won't want to leave. Promise! Lookit! 'Last night screams from the epidemic filled the arteries of the harmonica . . . Let's not say another word. Not today. There's enough already said in the libraries of the world.'?"" --George Elliott Clarke, author of Canticles I-II-III (MMXVI-MMXXIII) ""No gossamer romance, The Alphabet of Aliens often sings against a sky stooping down like a heavy song itself. Often eerie, this collection of prose poems investigates the nature, scope, and meaning of migrancy. Part diary, part dream book, it is a long, winding meditation on worlds lost and recovered. As images hurtle at us, we discover how the past keeps invading us while we go about seeking truth as surely as bees and ants seek sugar. Its huge arc of engaging, conflicting, perplexing impressions and reflections creates stunning metamorphoses in a scrambled rhythm. Stuffed with kaleidoscopic scenes from life and dream, it is an extravagant experiment, as if Kafka were refracted through Dali."" --Keith Garebian, theatre scholar, literary critic, and poet ""The beauty and whimsy of The Alphabet of Aliens will pull you into its text; once you're immersed in this startling and compelling book of poems, the words will get their hooks into your heart and not let go."" --Rhea Tregebov, author of Talking to Strangers ""Nag's tight prose along and his interweaving of nature's beautiful images and unique voices throughout this collection captures the narrator's dilemma and makes the reader feel these experiences. Well done. Nag is a master of his craft."" --Stella Leventoyannis Harvey, author of Finding Callidora ""Sabyasachi Nag's The Alphabet of Aliens is a triumph of vision, writing, and sustained expression of its subject. Nag's writing reminds the reader of other great writers of outsider literature, for instance Kafka, Orwell, and even William Burroughs."" --Stephen Morrissey, author of Farewell, Darkness: Selected poems

Author Information

Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag is the author of Hands Like Trees (fiction; Ronsdale Press, 2023) and three previous collections of poetry, including Uncharted (Mansfield Press, 2021). His work has been published in numerous journals worldwide. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of British Columbia and is an alumnus of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Simon Fraser University, and Humber School for Writers. He is the managing editor at Artisanal Writer, an online journal that explores books, lit craft, and theory. When he's not reading or teaching Creative Writing, he enjoys going paddling with his wife and son in the Great Lakes near Toronto.

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