Where Parallel Lines Meet

In Where Parallel Lines Meet, his fourth collection of poems, Tabish Khair captures with uncanny lyrical precision, the fragile beauty of the past. This past is preserved in a country (India) he no longer inhabits, but in which lives the language of his memory. Each poem tells a storyýwhether it is in the smell of rain on earth, in the taste of mangoes ripening in the straw, in an old nurseýs tales, or in a murder in South Delhi. In poems about love, the family, landscapes, and belonging and exile, Khair returns to a time and place that hold within them all his deeply-felt experiences of both innocence and discovery, cruelty and charm. They express his acute awareness of how rooted we really are in both history and the physical world. Rich in metaphor and intensity, Khairýs poems shine with an inner luminosity and sensuality.