spuytenduyvil

Describe a writing that is part water, part milk, part rain. Biswamit Dwibedy's Hubble Gardener is a wet home for this description. I admire, intensely, the way in which parts of language substitute for parietal contact, or innermost touch, in this extraordinary collection. "The sentence you never have flashes before your eyes," writes Dwibedy, bringing our attention, acutely, to the instant in which something both arrives and is dispelled.  The book attunes the reader to this exchange as it moves through themes of intense, erotic attachment ("Burn me something else..."), and the relation to place as "foreign" yet built, insistently and evocatively, through relation ("Friends become landscapes + ..."). I was particularly moved by Dwibedy's governing interest in the image as something that disperses in the act of looking or observing: what "had let the scenery disperse in their eyes." In working so closely with the particulate matter of visible and invisible outlines, realms, bodies and even thought, Dwibedy convenes the book as a space that is working through or installing an idea about embodiment, even as it situates itself at the limit of sensation, the part of life and writing just before a feeling floods in. "The voice opens to the body," he writes, "but the body cannot keep the voice."  The result for me was a kind of ecstatic ache in the tendons of my own heart at the end of reading.  This is a book to be read on a balcony, at midnight, or dawn, or dusk, when the light is between and nothing is understood, not yet, not ever. A world, or pre-world, is glimpsed nevertheless and deeply known in ways that aren't easily transmitted in language. Something flares at the edge of the book: "A line that appeared when a spark fell."  I feel like it's my job to cup this spark and bring it here, into this sentence, so that you can see it in turn!  I am honored to write in support of this beautiful writer, who has written such a lovely and strange and very real book.  I hope you find your way to the balcony of your own life, with these remarkable poems.

     Bhanu Kapil

 

Biswamit’s writing isn’t an attempt to make a map. Rather, his writing is sights of sensations, is portraits, and, and of, exploratory forms.... Daily life and connections to friends and lovers are in his poems— “My own forest where I play every day.” Presence is created by the free form of prose being heard compressed in a line of poetry—new startings becoming noticeable between the two.

     Leslie Scalapino

 

Dwibedy has a unique and marvelous way of sculpting phrases that lie just beyond what we've already thought—and we feel our imaginations grow in response. His is a vision plugged directly into the heart, but also into the concrete world, underscoring the innate loving capacity of all things, from trees to twilight. This is a book driven by the immensity of possibility, and through it, Dwibedy's work makes new and amazing things possible.

     Cole Swensen