Cracklers At Night by Rita Banerjee

“Rita Banerjee’s poems are an acrobatic music, a swinging erudition, a hip lyric to make shape of Whitman’s “ostent evanescent”, a phrase he uses to conjure the metaphysical projections of the physical world. Banerjee, with thrilling compression and off-beat breaks, fashions a multi-dimensional America…With wit, play, consonance, anagram, assonance, the unexpected rhyme, Banerjee offers, in this short collection, a material, feminist, postcolonial critique of where we are as a nation, what we are made of, what we fail to make, and what we can make of language regardless. Cracklers at Night is a fantastic debut.”

–Patrick Rosal, author of Brooklyn Antediluvian, My American Kundiman, Boneshepherds, and Uprock, Headspin, Scramble, and Dive

–Srikanth Reddy, author of Voyager, Facts for Visitors, Readings in World Literature, and Changing Subjects: Digressions in American Poetry

“Rita Banerjee’s poems spin the reader into a world of tightly packed imagery that leaves us gasping at the edge of violent endings or floating in wondrous, ancient silences. With lyric intensity, delicacy, and humor, she has the capacity to make places and sounds palpable, taking the reader on a journey from Harlem to the Himalayas. This is a new voice of hypnotizing and rare beauty.”