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Ghostmasters (Hong Kong: Chameleon Press, 2010). ISBN-978-988-18623-1-0

Buy online from Paddyfield Hong Kong here.

Buy online from Amazon here.

Available to bookstores/trade from Ingrams, Bertrams and Gardners.

Poems in Ghostmasters have featured in journals includingWasafiri, Washington Square, Meanjin, Tinfish, XCP, How2journal, 91st Meridian, Fourth River, Quay Journal, Filling Station, Oxford Magazine, Papertiger, In Posse Review, Holly Rose Review, Almost Island, Softblow, Cha, Asia Literary Review, Indian Literature, Kavya Bharati, Chandrabhaga, Caravan magazine, Atlas and Zoland Poetry. Read two poems from Ghostmasters online on Asia Writes, here

 

Advance praise for Ghostmasters:

"Mani Rao’s poetry is entirely genuine in a way that I can’t help knowing from line to line. That is its risk and its vulnerability. The poems are not games but seem to draw from offstage but direct, lived experience, a close attention to the momentary and an acute awareness of both self and reader.  This is no rudderless, fashionable disjunction: for several years, she 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 

"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 forces are arranged and rearranged here into new and devastating ways of seeing and thinking about our lives." -- Cyril Wong

"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.  If you believe that reverence is a grave matter, this isn't the book for you.  For those who understand that the contingent is our truest place on earth--start shouting "I love you Mani Rao!" -- Claudia Keelan

"Mani Rao is an endlessly interesting poet, and in Ghostmasters the full range of her talent is on display, in poems that pluck and probe the various worlds of her imagination. "Maybe the highway robbers will have a special smile for me," she writes, and indeed the people, places, and things that haunt this book have their own special expressions, which reveal dark and delightful truths from "the ledge of knowing." Watch your step!" -- Christopher Merrill

 

FORTHCOMING:

The Bhagavad Gita - a translation of the poem (Autumn Hill Books, 2010).

Excerpts, translator's note, and essay "Repetitiveness in Gita translations" in eXchanges (Winter 2009). Read here.

 

JUST OUT & FORTHCOMING IN JOURNALS

“Lorine Niedecker Condens.” Interim 2010 (Vol 28, No 1 & 2). A poem-essay using only Niedecker’s words and her poetic principles, a “condensary” of her volume of collected works into six pages.

Essay "Caterpillar to Butterfly - Thoreau's dietary journey" in Thoreau Society Bulletin (Issue 270, Spring 2010).

Five poems on Indian myths from the manuscript of Gods R Us, in The Brown Critique blog.

Excerpts from Gita translation 2.22-2.25 inthe next issue of Circumference.

Essay "Automatic Writing" in the next issue of Fulcrum.

“Drought,” “Bird Union.” Poets of the American West. Ed Lowell Jaeger, Many Voices Press, 2010.

 

READ ONLINE

From current manuscript Gods R Us, poems on Greek and Indic mythology:

Poems in Almost Island

"Ganga Jump" in Desilit

"Father's Day" in Cordite

 

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