summonings

Indebted to the docupoetics tradition, Raena Shirali s summonings investigates the ongoing practice of witch ( daayan ) hunting in India. Here, poems interrogate the political implications & shortcomings of writing Subaltern personae while acknowledging the author s Westernized positionality. Continuing to explore multi-national and intersectional concerns around identity raised in her debut collection, Shirali asks how first- & second-generation immigrants reconcile the self with the lineages that shape it, wondering aloud about those lineages relationships to misogyny & violence. These precarious poems explore how antiquated & existing norms surrounding female mysticism in India & America inform each culture s treatment of women. As Jericho Brown wrote of Shirali s poetics in GILT, her comment on culture, on identity, on justice is her comment on poetry. summonings is comment on power & patriarchy, on authorial privilege & the shifting role of witness, &, ultimately, on an ethical poetics, grounded in the inevitable failure to embody the Other.