I’ve been hammering away so long at/ it, sweating blood like a slave at a/ pyramid-construction site, that I don’t/ even have to try anymore: every/ word I touch metamorphoses into// poetry. You see me/ doggedly hammering away at the/ keyboard, typing out a, 1,000-page un-/ readable document without missing/ a single punctuation but you don’t/ know that in my bedside drawer is a/ manuscript of un-publishable poetry,/ written out in a careful hand with green/ ink on yellow paper.// Do you know how long it has taken me to type out these poems?” Das Gupta’s confidence and his take on poetry strike at the outset, as he writes: “ I’m more obstinate than the/ underground train/ tunneling its way through the rocky ab-/ -domen of the city. Gary Jackson’s first poetry collection, Missing You, Metropolis, winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, succeeds in providing an interesting and fresh exploration of these questions, as well as questions about what mediums are perceived as art. He rightly propounds: “One of assets is an ability to rhyme and metricise naturally and unobtrusively, harnessing the way we talk at moments of heightened emotion, all that while pulling off a conversational precision, down to semicolons in dialogue.” In the preface to the collection Das Gupta writes a long poem titled “Obstinacy,” a soliloquy, where he asks: “… You think you know me?/ You’ve no fucking idea how lucid/ and dangerous I can be. These state-of-the-art cars will be programmed to twist and turn at 360 to ensure you do not miss any of the action while on this adventure.

Let me talk about Visceral Metropolis now: The book starts with an incisive foreword by Philip Nikolayev. Peruse the postcard-like pages to discover cultural treasures, amazing architecture and key landmarks of magnificent cities around the globe, including New.

Missing you metropolis