Poetry
‘November: Poems’
by Canada’s Jaspreet Singh,
Tops Audreys Books’ Edmonton Fiction Bestseller List
NEWS REPORT
NOVEMBER: POEMS, by Jaspreet Singh. Bayeux Arts, Canada, 2017. English, paperback: 124 pages. ISBN-10: 1988440122; ISBN-13: 978-1988440125. Cdn $12.56.
Here is the list of the top 10 fiction titles sold in Edmonton for the week ended September 10, 2017, compiled by Audrey's Books and provided by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, Canada
FICTION BESTSELLERS
1 November: Poems – Jaspreet Singh
2 Glass Houses – Louise Penny
3 The Golden House – Salman Rushdie
4 The Alice Network – Kate Quinn
5 A Great Reckoning – Louise Penny
6 A Legacy of Spies – John le Carré
7 A Column of Fire – Ken Follett
8 Into the Water – Paula Hawkins
9 The Child – Fiona Barton
10 Swing Time – Zadie Smith
Jaspreet Singh started writing these poems a few days after the death of his mother. In this work of mourning, memory, language and migration, his past life as a research scientist and ongoing wanderings mix intimately with a diversity of poetic forms. As he mourns the loss of his mother, he also bears witness and works through the genocidal violence his family survived in 1984.
Jaspreet Singh is a Canadian citizen and lives in Alberta. He is the author of Seventeen Tomatoes, a short story collection (Véhicule Press, 2004) and Chef, a novel (Véhicule Press, 2008; Bloomsbury, 2010) -- both books engage with the damaged landscapes of Kashmir.
His novel Helium (Bloomsbury, 2013) is a powerful meditation on historical forgetting.
Jaspreet’s work has been published internationally and has been translated into several languages. November is his first collection of poems.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO “November”, a collection of poems:
November (1984) was the month of mass murder of Sikhs across India. The genocidal violence was orchestrated by high-ranking officials of the Congress Party. Nearly three decades later, Jaspreet Singh’s mother, a survivor of that chaotic time, died. The haunting poems of November take their bearings from these two poles of loss.
The book evokes European writers Paul Celan, Primo Levi, and W. G. Sebald, whose melancholic work set itself against national amnesias around the crimes of the recent past. November pays homage to poets of the Indian sub-continent like Ghalib, Bullhe Shah, Amrita Pritam and Waris Shah. And it finds a place too for figures such as Nek Chand and Louise Bourgeois, artists of the anti-monumental, of “problems / which permit / particular solutions” but not general ones.
Reminiscent of the textile form known as phulkari, or “flower work,” this collection braids idioms, cultural reference points, and languages -- English, Punjabi, Hindi, German, Spanish. The voices of November are now tentative and heartbroken, now grave and prosecutorial, now antic and punningly self-mocking.
Even while Jaspreet Singh jokes about the “double-double” wall defending the mainstream of Canadian life from critical thought, or skewers “lazy fucked-up bad” assumptions about what it is to be an immigrant, the disarming word-play and imagistic revery of these poems guide the reader through grief and political disquiet to a stratum deeper than any one Muttersprache -- to linguistic possibility itself, and the real hope of connection with one’s “others.”
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“November: Selected Poems” can be purchased by CLICKING here.
September 2, 2017