Gas & Food, No Lodging by Devi S. Laskar
$14.99
Here are poems burnished by unquiet rage, fragments of subtle humor drenched in irony and sorrow. Here are lyrical forms gleaming with wry intelligence and a fierce originality.
Here is a collection poised to snap you out of your daydreams and into an alert wonder about this strange, familiar world.
–Elizabeth Rosner, author of “Electric City” and “Gravity.”
There are women and girls out there who are lost on a highway, who resort to the wiles of fairies and wicked stepmothers; to vengeful exes and adoring aunts. The road trip of Gas & Food, No Lodging travels the interstate of precise form, indelible language, and a music that rivals the wind. Devi Laskar has created a tryptic of dreams that is interpreted through mythologies as beloved as Persephone and Scheherazade and as twisted and as misfit as rubberneckers on a highway and dieters in a support group. Beneath the hardened images lay a loneliness underscored by a foreignness–not just to the country, the state, the road in-between, but also to the family and to the self. Devi Laskar says in Unanswered/Untranslatable/ “Memory is praise and plundered…” and in this solid and indelible collection, memory is also vexing and determined. Every word, every stanza, every verse holds strong.
–Elmaz Abinader, Author, This House, My Bones
Devi S. Laskar is a poet who deserves wider readership. She’s been toiling in the fields of poetry for many years now yielding poems that explore American culture in conflict with her Indian cultural identity; her woman self; and her need to write. Writing transforms her complicated modern life allowing in the mythic from Persephone to Ra. In her witty and masterful poem, “The All-Saints, GA, Overeaters Support Group/meeting #18” food connects to a variety of myths regarding the body, community and memory—from watermelons to pomegranates. The title poem, “Gas, Food, No Lodging” shows the poet in full American trope: “No one comes in to loiter. One buys beer, no candy./The traffic light never turns yellow or red. Just Get-n-Go.”—What is left as we leave one part of our lives for the promise of something new, different, that possible success. Laskar understands how mortality is differently perceived, and she often looks back to a culture that is thousands of years older than ours and what that offers—the tension from this knowledge lends her poems a kind poignant humor and bitter wisdom. “Gas, Food, No Lodging” will serve the poet well as she gains her much deserved wider readership.
–Patricia Spears Jones, author of “A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems” and “Painkiller.”
Description
Gas & Food, No Lodging
by Devi S. Laskar
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-160-7
2017
Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize(2020) for best debut novel set in the South, winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature sponsored by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association; selected by The Georgia Center for the Book as a 2019 book “All Georgians Should Read,” long-listed for the 9th annual DSC Prize in South Asian Literature and long-listed for the 2019 Golden Poppy Award sponsored by the NCIBA. The novel was named by The Washington Post as one of the 50 best books of 2019, and has garnered praise in Booklist, Chicago Review of Books, The Guardian and elsewhere. Laskar holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from such journals as poem-a-day(poets.org), Indian Express and Crab Orchard Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an alumna of both TheOpEdProject and VONA, among others. In 2017, Finishing Line Press published two poetry chapbooks. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California with her family.
Jami Macarty (verified owner) –
In GAS & FOOD, NO LODGING, Devi S. Laskar takes her cues from Virginia Woolf’s BETWEEN THE ACTS, and sets to “destroying youth and India.” That is, this poet and these poems concern themselves with “the latitude/ of separation” from familial superstitions and girlhood naiveté, from fairy tales and Greek mythology, from the “repetition of distress” and “bitter remembrance.” From those and associated imprisonments and endangerments–especially to the female body and being–to “how we begin// to choose the moment of our emancipation.” In these poems, those moments are wrought in the fire-cleansing, choice-claiming words of the poet. The GPS is set for the longitude and latitude of “the moment…/ Persephone leaves the underworld…”; Devi S. Laskar, a most capable poet-driver, is at the wheel. Readers, call “shotgun”!