My OperaOutLoud Presents Mani Rao's new book, 'Ghostmasters'
Sunday, May 30, 2010 8:35:41 AM
Reading from Ghostmasters by Mani Rao
Wed 2 June 2010 at 8 pm | OutLoud, Fringe Club
Ghostmasters is Mani Rao’s eighth book of poetry, published by Chameleon Press and launching at the Hong Kong Book Fair in July 2010.
The book brings together a selection of Mani’s poems from the last seven years of writing. Poems in Ghostmasters have featured in literary journals in the USA, UK, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and India – Wasafiri, Washington Square, Meanjin, Tinfish, XCP, How2journal, 91st Meridian, Fourth River, Quay Journal, Filling Station, Oxford Magazine, Papertiger, In Posse Review, Almost Island, Softblow, Cha, Asia Literary Review, Indian Literature, Kavya Bharati, Chandrabhaga, Caravan magazine, Atlas and Zoland Poetry.
A co-founder of OutLoud readings in Hong Kong, Mani’s poetry has featured in anthologies by Penguin, Bloodaxe, and in WW Norton’s Language for a New Century anthology. She has performed at literary festivals in Melbourne, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Singapore, Chicago and at New York PEN World Voices. Translations of her poems have been published in Chinese, French, Arabic, Korean, German, Italian and Latin. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program in 2005 and 2009, and held the 2006 University of Iowa International Programs writer-in-residence fellowship. Rao’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita will be released in 2010/2011 in USA and India.
Advance praise for Ghostmasters:
"There's an uncanny lightness in Mani Rao's poetry, a buoyancy that lifts the reader weightlessly to a safer place. Again and again in this wonderful book, I'm moved and gratified by the effortlessness of Rao's obedience, even as she attends the language with devoted attention. If you believe that reverence is a grave matter, this isn't the book for you. For those who understand that the contingent is our truest place on earth--start shouting "I love you Mani Rao!" -- Claudia Keelan
"Mani Rao is an endlessly interesting poet, and in Ghostmasters the full range of her talent is on display, in poems that pluck and probe the various worlds of her imagination. "Maybe the highway robbers will have a special smile for me," she writes, and indeed the people, places, and things that haunt this book have their own special expressions, which reveal dark and delightful truths from "the ledge of knowing." Watch your step!" -- Christopher Merrill
"Mani’s poems are death-defying acts of language, more daring than love-poems because they are unafraid to let love go, to release the self from itself. Lost to rediscovered words, miscommunications, fading memories, frogs and natural forces are arranged and rearranged here into new and devastating ways of seeing and thinking about our lives." -- Cyril Wong
"Mani Rao’s poetry is entirely genuine in a way that I can’t help knowing from line to line. That is its risk and its vulnerability. The poems are not games but seem to draw from offstage but direct, lived experience, a close attention to the momentary and an acute awareness of both self and reader. This is no rudderless, fashionable disjunction: for several years, she has been cutting her own fiercely singular path through the thickets of our language; with each new book her compositional values become both more light and more precise, and her gestures—for this is a poetry of intense ellipsis—more sure, more instantaneous, more stunning."-- Vivek Narayanan
Press enquiries and photos contact emailmanirao@gmail.com
For more information on Mani Rao’s publications, see www.manirao.com
Wed 2 June 2010 at 8 pm | OutLoud, Fringe Club
Ghostmasters is Mani Rao’s eighth book of poetry, published by Chameleon Press and launching at the Hong Kong Book Fair in July 2010.
The book brings together a selection of Mani’s poems from the last seven years of writing. Poems in Ghostmasters have featured in literary journals in the USA, UK, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and India – Wasafiri, Washington Square, Meanjin, Tinfish, XCP, How2journal, 91st Meridian, Fourth River, Quay Journal, Filling Station, Oxford Magazine, Papertiger, In Posse Review, Almost Island, Softblow, Cha, Asia Literary Review, Indian Literature, Kavya Bharati, Chandrabhaga, Caravan magazine, Atlas and Zoland Poetry.
A co-founder of OutLoud readings in Hong Kong, Mani’s poetry has featured in anthologies by Penguin, Bloodaxe, and in WW Norton’s Language for a New Century anthology. She has performed at literary festivals in Melbourne, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Singapore, Chicago and at New York PEN World Voices. Translations of her poems have been published in Chinese, French, Arabic, Korean, German, Italian and Latin. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program in 2005 and 2009, and held the 2006 University of Iowa International Programs writer-in-residence fellowship. Rao’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita will be released in 2010/2011 in USA and India.
Advance praise for Ghostmasters:
"There's an uncanny lightness in Mani Rao's poetry, a buoyancy that lifts the reader weightlessly to a safer place. Again and again in this wonderful book, I'm moved and gratified by the effortlessness of Rao's obedience, even as she attends the language with devoted attention. If you believe that reverence is a grave matter, this isn't the book for you. For those who understand that the contingent is our truest place on earth--start shouting "I love you Mani Rao!" -- Claudia Keelan
"Mani Rao is an endlessly interesting poet, and in Ghostmasters the full range of her talent is on display, in poems that pluck and probe the various worlds of her imagination. "Maybe the highway robbers will have a special smile for me," she writes, and indeed the people, places, and things that haunt this book have their own special expressions, which reveal dark and delightful truths from "the ledge of knowing." Watch your step!" -- Christopher Merrill
"Mani’s poems are death-defying acts of language, more daring than love-poems because they are unafraid to let love go, to release the self from itself. Lost to rediscovered words, miscommunications, fading memories, frogs and natural forces are arranged and rearranged here into new and devastating ways of seeing and thinking about our lives." -- Cyril Wong
"Mani Rao’s poetry is entirely genuine in a way that I can’t help knowing from line to line. That is its risk and its vulnerability. The poems are not games but seem to draw from offstage but direct, lived experience, a close attention to the momentary and an acute awareness of both self and reader. This is no rudderless, fashionable disjunction: for several years, she has been cutting her own fiercely singular path through the thickets of our language; with each new book her compositional values become both more light and more precise, and her gestures—for this is a poetry of intense ellipsis—more sure, more instantaneous, more stunning."-- Vivek Narayanan
Press enquiries and photos contact emailmanirao@gmail.com
For more information on Mani Rao’s publications, see www.manirao.com
