Ghostmasters

Mani Rao's poetry has featured in anthologies by Penguin, WW Norton and Bloodaxe, and has been translated into French, Italian, German, Korean, Chinese and Arabic. She lives between India, Hong Kong and the USA. Ghostmasters is her eighth book, and collects poems published in: Zoland Poetry, XCP, Washington Square, Wasafiri, Tinfish, Softblow, Indian Literature, Almost Island, 91st Meridian and other journals. Advance praise: Mani Rao is an endlessly interesting poet, and in Ghostmasters the full range of her talent is on display. The people, places, and things that haunt this book have their own special expressions, which reveal dark and delightful truths. 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 orces are arranged and rearranged here into new and devastating ways of seeing and thinking about our lives. -- Cyril Wong For several years, Mani Rao 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 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. -- Claudia Keelan