Ranjit Hoskote - "Icelight"

Ranjit Hoskote will discuss Icelight. 

This event will be held in person at The Seminary Co-op . At this time, masks are required for in-store events.

REGISTER HERE

About the book: Icelight, Ranjit Hoskote's eighth collection of poems, enacts the experience of standing at the edge—of a life, a landscape, a world assuming new contours or going up in flames. Yet, the protagonists of these poems also stand at the edge of epiphany. In the title poem, we meet the Neolithic cave-dweller who, dazzled by a shapeshifting nature, crafts the first icon. The 'I' of these poems is not a sovereign 'I'. A questing, questioning voice, it locates itself in the web of life, in relation to the cosmos. In 'Tacet', the speaker asks: "What if I had/ no skin/ Of what/ am I the barometer?" Long committed to the Japanese mono no aware aesthetic, Hoskote embraces talismans, premonitions, fossils: active residues from the previous lives of people and places. Icelight is a book about transitions and departures, eloquent in its acceptance of transience in the face of mortality.

About the author: Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, translator, art critic, and independent curator. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, ranging through poetry, art criticism, cultural history, and poetry in translation. His collections of poetry include Hunchprose (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, 2021), Jonahwhale (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, 2018; published in the UK by Arc as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, 2022), Central Time (Penguin/Viking, 2014), Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1985–2005 (Penguin, 2006) and, in German translation, Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006). His translation of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012), the first annotated critical edition of a major Anglophone Indian poet’s work. He co-curated, with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim, the 2008 Gwangju Biennale in Korea; he was also the curator of India’s first-ever national pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, titled Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode. Hoskote has been a Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, and has held writing residencies at Villa Waldberta, Munich; Theater der Welt, Essen/ Mülheim; the Polish Institute, Berlin; and BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Hoskote lives and works in Bombay, India.