Bini

Poetry. Edited by Susan Gardner. Winner of the Red Mountain Press 2015 Discovery Award. BINI is a flow of memory salvaged in the delicate act of recollection. The poems here are untethered to any physical time and appear as ephemeral as a gentle wind sweeping across a moonlit mountain, and yet these are poems firmly rooted in lived experience across cultures and geographies. Each poem in this luminous collection stands as a signpost of diversity, of peoples, places, cultures and the...
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Poetry. Edited by Susan Gardner. Winner of the Red Mountain Press 2015 Discovery Award. BINI is a flow of memory salvaged in the delicate act of recollection. The poems here are untethered to any physical time and appear as ephemeral as a gentle wind sweeping across a moonlit mountain, and yet these are poems firmly rooted in lived experience across cultures and geographies. Each poem in this luminous collection stands as a signpost of diversity, of peoples, places, cultures and the immigrant experience.



"In BINI, Nabin Chhetri has created a poetic world of singular originality where landscape and memory are invoked equally with exact, clear- sighted detail and a rare meditative kind of charge. His poetry speaks of endurance--of the imagination and of feeling--as they contemplate the most shocking of human experiences as well as the most beautiful, the separations of distance and the long-lived associations of home. Chhetri's power lies in his painstaking and loving exactitude, like the long afternoon spent 'collecting one by one/all that was lost/in the name of home.'"--Jane Draycott



"BINI is a remarkable and elemental work of corporeal power and lyricism. Firmly grounded in the terrain of several lands and the kinship of several cultures this poetry draws upon varying climes of the natural world and the perfect details of mortal humanity. The borders are not simply those of geography but of life and death, of sexual desire and emotional loss, as the radiant poetry presents us with a brilliantly detailed cosmos of beautiful moments removed from time and given permanence in an infinite spectrum and scale of metaphor. Grief, passion, resilence, all are fluently woven in these vivid lines and made more stable than the life where they originated: that is the triumph of BINI. Chhetri draws from the poignant cadence and vision of an old Sanskrit tradition of amorous song whilst simultaneously displaying the complex emotions of a darkly outlined modernity, all in one sophisticated and seamless fashioning. This is the work of a true laureate."--Kevin McGrath



"Nabin Chhetri's poetry is both rich in feeling and sharp in its observations. A deceptively direct voice (reminiscent at times of classical 'Mountains and Rivers' Chinese poetry) often conceals hidden depths--and beauties--of nuance and intensity. Sometimes hauntingly and movingly emotional, sometimes provocatively moral and ironic, Chhetri's lyric freshness and force is an important and inspiring contribution to Nepalese poetry in English."--Dr. Wayne Price



"BINI is an evocative meditation on the nature of time, memory and a longing to return to the comfort of the familiar--even when it is flawed. 'Each time I enter inside [his room], I am humbled with memories' says the author Nabin Chhetri in one of several moving tributes to his father and other family members. What emerges from this deeply felt memoir of growing up in Nepal is not just a riveting journey across geographical and emotional territories but an intense and sustained sensory experience. Whether sloshing along the 'mud filled road to Annapurna' ('The Road to Annapurna'), drinking tea from a glass 'smelling of kerosene' ('When I Go to Nepal'), eating fish on the way to Katmandu or remembering the grandmother who died one morning 'letting out her breath in small installments'--here is poetic storytelling at its best by a writer whose command of detail brings every page alive with astonishing richness and clarity, and with it, an ability to spark the imaginations and emotions of his readers in a unique way. An enthralling debut.'--Jenny Lewis