When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me

If I had only one word to define this book, it would be aliveness a synonym, plausibly, in Ananda Devi's idiolect, for freedom. Everything from the Night in the title, to skin, to mud, to a green sari, to sound, to Time itself is alive Translated with calm dexterity and breathtaking attention by Kazim Ali, this is a collection that held my body eyes and heart and brain in its jaws from beginning till end. Karthika Na r Ananda Devi's poetry singes and sings of the body electric, bound by the complex, colonial island politics of Mauritius and yet boundless like the waters that surround it. This book of harsh lyric and enigmatic and erotic prose, takes on a second life in Kazim Ali's sensitive translation."