First, five different parts corresponding to “the five arrows of Kama, the Hindu god of love and desire. Wonderful poems, with words that flow on the pages, even disturbing the “classical setup, horizontal, vertical, in a lighter colour or crossed out. Then a very long poem recounting the life of a family of refugees, a father with quite a few children and no mother. This poem slowly dissolves into a prayer to God. The construction again is impressive. Each paragraph starts with the following letter of the alphabet and follows the Fibonacci sequence…one sentence for A, two for B, three for C, five for D and so on. The whole is a very touching and sweet book.
“… – I need some
make-up so I can do the red lips like
Mama used to; the kids so rarely talk about their
mother but when they do it’s so casual, almost
maddening: as if she were still alive, still in the
midst of everything, as if she would
manifest, walk in the door, any
moment now, you can’t make out whether their
memories fade at a faster rate than yours or if it’s even
more simple: that the impulse to
mourn does not linger in their
minds, as it does in yours, and they have
made their peace with her passing, refusing to
magnify their loss any
more than necessary – you
mull this over as you drift into a
muddled sleep, stretched on the sofa”
