Simple Fantasies by Sujash Purna

For a young poet like Sujash Purna, it might seem surprising that all but a few of the twenty poems in his Simple Fantasies, concern themselves with time and its passing. This clear obsession (from a poet who has already given to the world a book titled Epidemic of Nostalgia) continues to produce lyrically poignant work with consistently arresting and sometimes surreal imagery and a sense of loss belying each captured moment’s present. For though we are “bound by time” (“An Urn on a Bookshelf,”) time itself “runs away like rustling /leaves brushing gently/against our bare feet” (“Holding on to”). The only respite offered comes i n the title poem in which love, at least for a time, allows the poet to be “no more haunted” the years “departure doesn’t scare me, / with you beside me, we can cup our hands, catch watercolor raindrops.” Of course the title of that poem is “Simple Fantasies,” but perhaps in that poem and it title, Purna suggests the power of both imagination and love to suspend, in a beautifully rendered moment, the dictates of time.

–Joe Benevento, author of The Cracker Box Poems

One thing that separates the poet Sujash Purna from many of his contemporaries is his sharp wit, sense of humor, and considerable skill for unlayering conscious versions of the self as a measure of social performance in which the speaker fails to settle his conflicted heart. In Simple Fantasies what might at first appear to be persona translates more accurately to a Jungian sense of anima, a deeper hidden self. Here is a consummate magician who often takes as his strategy a series of comic missteps, which shift a poem’s central consideration from the earthly realm to the metaphysical.
–Marcus Cafagña, author of All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season

One part of the fantasy of Sujash Purna’s Simple Fantasies is to be released from what haunts us –“I almost forced you to return to my memory / as if on a Ouija board”. We are haunted by our own stories, as we are haunted by what others have felt safe enough to share with us, but from which we may never recover (“I remember moments and lapses, and ghosts buzzing / like bees on a honeycomb of gilded space and time”). But the other part, woven throughout this collection, is love. The people and places, the smells and tastes we love today are not destined to be tomorrow’s ghosts–we are the caretakers of these memories and hold them forever in our bodies.

–Sara Burge, author of Apocalypse Ranch