Dwibedy, Biswamit: Erode

ERODE is Biswamit Dwibedy’s fourth full-length collection of poetry and brings together his first out-of-print book, Ozalid, and the expansion and continuation of that work into Erode. As a single collection, these sequences unfold in movements of erasure and collage. What emerges is a poetics of accumulation and subtraction, a method of excavation that reveals the personal buried within the communal, the lyric submerged in the residual. If erasure is a form of attention, then ERODE listens acutely—to language, to silence, to the faint signal of the other. With a sensibility both spare and lush, ERODE traces the shifting terrain of meaning, where fragments flare into wholeness and then dissolve again.

Praise for ERODE

How are you not already reading this book and inside it already? Biswamit Dwibedy will teach you how to read Biswamit Dwibedy like a golden lock flicked from a bang, like Nina Simone lip-syncing the latest Björk, like wearing faux fur to a real red paint party inside a faux bois factory. If a channel is a communion, a chunnel, a cascading share of royal commonalities, you are already on this channel and we are in it already together, our pressed gold silhouettes coating the museum walls. These poems are the platters passed around at unpoetry parties where the thread is picked up as quick as canapés and just as delish. You think you’ve heard these poems somewhere before and that’s how you feel about things you need—you can’t imagine them not existing, you just can’t. —Sandra Doller

A simply gorgeous book! So many of its lines are surprising and yet also instantly inevitable—and filled with such kindness and compassion; we feel them reaching out to the other in all of us and to all others in a loving embrace. Its language is at once spare and precise and absolutely huge, swelling to occupy the reader, heart, mind, and soul, with a hope based in intelligence and promise—so rare these days and exquisitely useful. —Cole Swensen

Biswamit’s poems arrive and depart simultaneously, or at least give an impression of being both a trail ahead and a trail behind a moving figure. This seems to me to be a cosmic figure, in the spirit of Jesus, because of its gleam and its disappearance. What is thrown, like wheat or gold, flies, falls, vanishes but leaves marks. The marks are all we have to judge the figure by. I guess that is called sleight of hand? This is the way I understand them, in any case, and feel their pain as being a suffusion of which there is no more or less than what is written. —Fanny Howe