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Overview
Dothead is an exploration of selfhood both intense and exhilarating. Within the first pages, Amit Majmudar asserts the claims of both the self and the other: the title poem shows us the place of an Indian American teenager in the bland surround of a mostly white peer group, partaking of imagery from the poet’s Hindu tradition; the very next poem is a fanciful autobiography, relying for its imagery on the religious tradition of Islam. From poems about the treatment at the airport of people who look like Majmudar (“my dark unshaven brothers / whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends”) to a long, freewheeling abecedarian poem about Adam and Eve and the discovery of oral sex, Dothead is a profoundly satisfying cultural critique and a thrilling experiment in language. United across a wide range of tones and forms, the poems inhabit and explode multiple perspectives, finding beauty in every one.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781101947098 |
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Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 03/20/2018 |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 120 |
Sales rank: | 901,755 |
Product dimensions: | 6.80(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
www.amitmajmudar.com
Read an Excerpt
Dothead
Well yes, I said, my mother wears a dot.
I know they said “third eye” in class, but it’s not an eye eye, not like that. It’s not some freak third eye that opens on your forehead like on some Chernobyl baby. What it means is, what it’s showing is, there’s this unseen eye, on the inside. And she’s marking it.
It’s how the X that says where treasure’s at is not the treasure, but as good as treasure.—
All right. What I said wasn’t half so measured.
In fact, I didn’t say a thing. Their laughter had made my mouth go dry. Lunch was after
World History; that week was India—myths,
caste system, suttee, all the Greatest Hits.
The white kids I was sitting with were friends,
at least as I defined a friend back then.
So wait, said Nick, does your mom wear a dot?
I nodded, and I caught a smirk on Todd—
She wear it to the shower? And to bed?—
while Jesse sucked his chocolate milk and Brad was getting ready for another stab.
I said, Hand me that ketchup packet there.
And Nick said, What? I snatched it, twitched the tear,
and squeezed a dollop on my thumb and worked circles till the red planet entered the house of war and on my forehead for the world to see my third eye burned those schoolboys in their seats,
their flesh in little puddles underneath,
pale pools where Nataraja cooled his feet.
Ode to a Drone
Hell-raiser, razor-feathered riser, windhover over
Peshawar,
power’s joystick-blithe thousand-mile scythe,
proxy executioner’s proxy ax pinged by a proxy server,
winged victory,
pilot cipher unburdened by aught
but fuel and bombs,
fool of God, savage idiot savant
sucking your benumbed trigger-finger gamer’s thumb
His Love of Semicolons
The comma is comely, the period, peerless,
but stack them one atop the other, and I am in love; what I love is the end that refuses to stop,
the promise that something will come in a moment though the saying seem all said;
a grammatical afterlife, fullness that spills past the full stop, not so much dead as taking a breather, at worst, stunned;
the sentence regroups and restarts,
its notation bespeaking momentum, its silence dividing the beats of a heart;
Table of Contents
Kedgeree Ingredients
Dothead 3
The Autobiography of Khwaja Mustasim 4
T.S.A. 5
ODE to a Drone 6
Dynasty 7
The Illuminator 8
The Interrogation 9
Immigration and Naturalization 10
Training Course 12
Kills Hot 14
The Enduring Appeal of the Western Canon 16
To the Hyphenated Poets 17
The Star-Spangled Turban 19
Winged Words 21
His Love of Semicolons 22
Steep Ascension 23
The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up 26
Rune Poem 27
Horse Apocalypse 30
Abecedarian 32
Sex 43
To Anne Sexton 44
Love Song for Doomed Youth 46
The Doll 47
Crocodile Porn 48
Joint Effort 50
The Top 52
Save the Candor 53
The Metamorphosis 55
Lineage 57
Welcome Home, Troops! 59
Are You Hungry? 60
Taste Bud Sonzal 61
Dystopiary 62
1914: The Name Game 63
Black Hands 65
James Bond Suite 67
1 The Astronomy of Bond Girls 67
2 The Short and Happy Life of Plenty O'Toole 67
3 Hymn to Sean Connery 69
In a Gallery 71
Et Tu 73
Logomachia 74
a Neuroscience 74
b Erasure of the Final Scene of King Lear (I) 74
b Erasure of the Final Scene of King Lear (II) 76
a Radiology 77
c Stem Cells 78
d Heretical Fugue 79
d Shadow-Cross Fugue 80
c Pandemic Ghazal 81
e The Waltz of Descartes and Mohammed 82
f FE 83
g Holy 84
g Devolution 85
f "There Fell A Great Star" 87
e Hide and Seek 88
Augustine the Hippo 90
Rimbaud in Harar 91
Recombinant Fairy Tale 94
Kennewick Man Elegy 96
Pattern and Snarl 97
From the Egg 98
Invocation 100
Acknowledgments 103