Echo in Four Beats by Rita Banerjee

$19.99

 

“Banerjee’s polyglot collection–pushing at the edges of language; abounding with erasure, mistranslation and wit; impossible to contain in a single tongue. From the smallest pieces of our world–the falling snow, cobblestone, a reflection in the water–Banerjee has crafted something astonishing that reaches towards higher truths.”

–Stephen Aubrey, author of Daguerreotype and What I Took in My Hand and Co-Artistic Director of The Assembly Theater, NYC

 

“Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats is a lyric wonder. Wildly intertextual and multilingual, Banerjee mines literatures, histories, and geographies, both eastern and western, to produce an expansive collection of poems. The breadth of her work is staggering and yet utterly approachable, at once intimate and worldly. This may well be the first truly post-national book of poems I’ve ever read. I look forward to reading it again and again.”

–Jaswinder Bolina, author of The 44th of July, Phantom Camera, and Carrier Wave

 

“Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats is a multilingual, intercontinental arpeggio of a journey on which ‘one layer/ of enchantment// dispels another.’ From Ovid to Baudelaire, from Manhattan to Atlantis to the Ganges, these poems conjure shape-shifting and gyroscopic worlds where erasure is sustenance, myth is religion, and home is but a constant state of momentary arrivals. Banerjee’s attentive, precise, incantatory poems reverberate ‘not sound not/ voice” and resound with the “enchantments of art/ and life.’”

–Tara Skurtu, author of The Amoeba Game and Skurtu, Romania

 

“In our narcissism-addled times, Rita Banerjee awakens Echo out of mythical slumber and accords her center stage, with stirring results. These poems dance nimbly from the playful to the sacred, the pentatonic-ancient to the jazzy-contemporary, the observational to the contemplative, and cross languages and borders with abandon, from trains in India to a Munich museum to the local copy shop. Yet while they may ‘change [their] temperament as quickly as salamanders change skin,’ Echo in Four Beats  is constantly returning us to a tonic center and rebuilding its chords and arpeggios anew, offering a music both savory and profound.” 
–Tim Horvath, author of Understories and Circulation

 

“Echo in Four Beats sounds the singular pulse of Harlem, Kyoto, Nainital and San Francisco to uncover a deeper mystery; what makes a word into a sensation, a sensation into a moment and what, in the swirling constellation of geographies, turns a moment into the sublime. Amidst the kinetic search for buried treasure in everyday encounters with photocopiers and the breathless search for lost objects, there are also unexpected collisions with silence so shocking, they stop us dead in our tracks. We realize the whiteness between words was here all along; its stillness curving the inside of this syncopated journey across time and space.”

–Dipika Guha, playwright and author of Mechanics of Love and The Rules, and screenwriter for American Gods

 

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Description

Echo in Four Beats

by Rita Banerjee

$19.99, Full-Length, paper

978-1-63534-407-3

2018

Rita Banerjee is the editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, March 2018) and the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, February 2018), which was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, Three Mile Harbor Poetry Prize, and Aquarius Press / Willow Books Literature Award, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010).  Her work appears in Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Hyphen Magazine, Electric Literature, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Scofield, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.  She is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and an Associate Scholar of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and teaches on modernism, art house film, and South Asian literary theory at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.  She is currently working on a novel about a Tamil-Jewish American family in crisis during a post-authoritarian regime, a documentary film about race and voyeurism in the United States and in France, and a collection of essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool.

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