Description:
Through the wide-eyed study of beauty and the eerie stations of the erotic, Love the Stranger maps the body in its struggle with desire and absence. Deshpande's poems treat love, kinship, and loss as instruments of our own awakening-tools that can help us encounter our own mysteriousness and touch new ground. As they peer into childhood memory, the end of an affair, dream dismemberments, and even Kim Kardashian, the lyrics in Love the Stranger guide us toward the truths hidden within the body.
Brief description: Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger (YesYes Books) and the chapbooks The Rest of the Body (YesYes Books) and The Umbrian Sonnets (PANK). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2015 Scotti Merrill Memorial Award and the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a Kundiman fellowship, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri, Saltonstall Arts Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. Jay holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia. He leads the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program and teaches in the MFA programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.
Review Quotes:
One of Poets & Writers Top 10 Debuts of 2015
Included in Literary Hub's "30 Must-Read Poetry Debuts from 2015"
Three poems from Love the Stranger included in Boston Review's Top Poems of 2015
"Deshpande tracks those moments when we become strange to ourselves, when indecision and failure wrench us open. He writes with a kind of glowing, dreamlike clarity about desire, distraction, regret-the ways we rush past ourselves, the ways we hurt each other. " - Joanna Klink, The Nightfields
This is a book of great beauty and of terrible suspicion regarding that beauty. This is a poet of intensifying linguistic gift and of terrible suspicion regarding that gift. Is there, yet, an Auto-Voyeuristic school of poetry? If not, then Jay Deshpande's troubling and gorgeous Love the Stranger-"watch yourself grow muscle in your failure/and hate it"-could be the founding document. -Josh Bell, Alamo Theory