Understan

Understan is a reflective journey through what lies below the surface, crisscrossing continents, interior landscapes and decades, frequently and sometimes impatiently. Despite that span, it is rooted in minute, personal details, using them to unravel love, death and longing on visits to memory and other cities. It abuses belief and superstition equally, like an unhinged man yelling at all the cars passing on a street. At the same time, it stops to pray or praise elders, lovers and children. It contains jihadis, garbage trucks, a hummingbird, brothers, zero. In Understan, the poet is lost but holds the map to everywhere.

In an era where thoughtless majoritarianism (see Cultural Appropriation Prize) and insane populism (see Trump, Ford) are mating to produce the beasts of the coming apocalypse, the poetry of lovers and iconoclasts from other lands but very present here and now, is an antidote for dull conformity, prefabricated canons, and the expectations of an unchallenged priesthood of culture. Any act of literature by an immigrant and a person of colour is a necessary and subversive act of great beauty. Understan is such an act of resistance.