These Errors are Correct

In his first collection since English (2004), Jeet Thayil offers his most affecting work to date, a startling meditation on love, grief, and the random dictates of history. In poems shaped by tenderness and rage, time blurs into a continuous present visited by Beethoven and Babur, by unnamed protagonists for whom religion and addiction are interchangeable, and by a remot god-like figure who will lick/your wound with his infected tongue. Thayil uses a stunning range of fixed and invented forms - rhymed syllabics, terza rima, ghazals, sonnets, the sestina, the canzone, stealth rhy,es - to create a poetry of urgency, intimacy and passion. these Errors and Correct is a haunting book by one of the most engaging voices you will read, full of wisdom and regret.