This book is as big as India and as small as the breath it takes to pronounce one of its words. When you open the door of its cover, you enter another world which is a more vivid version of this one where George Kalamaras is shaman, interior astrologer, cartographer of fantastic spaces. Word-levitator and world-levigator. When you open this book, you enter the sensual world of "saris, kurtas, Banaras silk" while you simultaneously step into the spiritual core where Kalamaras has "Mapped an interior astrology / of ascent, altar of the spine."

His poetry is cantilevered, projected outward while reaching inward into the wonder-lured and prismatic. Like the rich Indian landscape, this poetry is erotically spiritual and spiritually erotic. Kalamaras provides a dwelling where "Something // is always burning and something / is always in heat." And ultimately the reader engages through these poems the transformative power of love/poetry, and with this comes the revelation: you cannot open this book without experiencing "the lover's tongue."

--Patrick Lawler

Stranger and inhabitant, taken by surprise, shocked by recognitions, George Kalamaras has made his India into poems. In them, a man is alive. Poetic energy runs and ripples through the text. His acute kinetic descriptions and silences flash across everyday exotic events. The excitement of discovery is cumulative.

--Marie Ponsot

The name Kalamaras means, as everyone knows, He Who Channels the Throat Songs of the Inflamed Detectives of Southern Surreality. He has more language at his command than Peter Mark Roget, but though we recognize the words, their electrifying combinations have never been heard before. Given Kalamaras's impressively penetrating knowledge of English literature, and his pendant for Asian poetry, Tantric Buddhist texts, and 20th century contemporary international poetry in translation, the delicious eclecticism of the poems and the velocity of their outrageously wide range of reference should be no surprise. But the alarming fact is: they are as surprising as they are addictive.

--Forrest Gander

George Kalamaras is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990. He is the author of five previous books of poetry, three of which are full-length, Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair (Quale Press, 2004), Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000), which won the Four Way Books Intro Series, chosen by Michael Burkard. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, Greece, India, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, including The Best American Poetry 2008 and 1997, The Bitter Oleander, Epoch, Hambone, New American Writing, New Letters, Sulfur, Talisman, TriQuarterly, and others. He is the recipient of Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993) and the Indiana Arts Commission (2001), and first prize in the 1998 Abiko Quarterly International Poetry Prize (Japan). A long-time practitioner of yogic meditation, he is also the author of a 1994 scholarly book on Hindu mysticism and Western language theory from State University of New York Press, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence. During 1994, he spent several months in India on an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation and the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture. He lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana with his wife, the writer Mary Ann Cain, and their beagle, Barney, and they often return to northern Colorado, where George and Mary Ann lived for several years in the 1980s.

THE CRAWL OF ASH

In the Banaras garden of your Bengali friends,
the world is fashioned from coconut shreds
and death. Life here is simple
and life takes its tone
from the sound of ash crawling
your name just a few lanes east
from the cremation grounds. At the river Ganges,
heavy iron combs keep the tongue
of a pilgrim in place. Two aniseeds
blow dark among glowing scars
of a man who, at dawn, approaches you
with a carp he's pulled from river muck.
A floating gold leaf is dulled by the scrawl
of small stones. Somewhere in your heart
its recent branch fastens the wind
around which charred remains of others
cull your molecular weight. Or
centuries of dark slags
into moist human skin. There is such a thing
as fear of loss, as your insides
shredding apart before the mirror
each morning from incarnation
to incarnation? As Bengali rice
placed before you on the plate, reflecting strains
of yourself you cannot refuse?
This, thirteen years in the past,
and every moment since is crushed Indiana
corn. This garden sprawling backward
toward river stone through threads
of raisins, cashews, and cruel coconut
milk. This ash, toward a fire of what
you might burn to become, or turn
away from time after time with what seems
a first and always brilliant birth.

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