Blind Screens
By Ranjani Murali
Published by Almost Island Books (2017)
Paperback, 96 pages | ISBN-13: 978-81-921295-3-2
Winner of the 2016 Almost Island Manuscript Competition, judged by Adil Jussawalla and Eliot Weinberger.
“Ranjani Murali's lines are usually triggered by immediate experience or by an experience intentionally recollected to stress its immediacy: what actually happened, what body and mind experienced at a particular time... Considering the range of subjects she covers, the risks Murali takes are many, and skilfully faced. Her subjects are starkly contemporary: terrorists, abandoned Alcatraz, Tamil movies, sexual harassment—our daily newsfeed, but which, in her world, are also tropes of entrapment. Her escapes or attempts to escape are through real or imaginary flight: the sky's her saviour.”
— Adil Jussawalla
“Ranjani Murali's is a fast-moving eye, missing nothing, sparing nothing. Every detail of the seen world is here, which is at once both the absurdity and the dis-ease of our represented and re-represented lives, troubled by the position of privilege in which we all 'reek of watching.' With a mind 'suspended // between seeing and being seen' the poet guides us through a kind of underworld, urgently crisscrossing the hyper-real of cinema and self-deception in a global theatre in which any one of us might 'step out into the raw / brick temple, rain-shorn, and bow in reverence / to an abscess adorned with flower;' where 'the hero is smoking in / the trailer-toilet, his window overlooking a river where / a buffalo is courting storm-water;' and the Supreme-Mother-Goddess is 'a myth so real that / it makes you pause at every corner and turn furtively back, // wondering if she is tailing you.' Under Murali's cool urbanity, her unshakable irony and equanimity, runs a line of anger that feels exactly like a line of clarity.”
— Susan Tichy
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In India and elsewhere @ Leftword
In the US @ Small Press Distribution
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Read an interview with the author here.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
“In Blind Screens, Murali slips a cast of heroine characters, female actors and women in celluloid-stronghold cities like Bombay and Madras into poems in several registers, and just like all subtext cinematic and otherwise, they bind the collection together... This accomplished collection contains many variegations that fill and colour its pages with all the elaborate textures of Indian cinema...”
— Sharanya Manivannan in OPEN
“In incremental movements, the collection departs from the minuscule to the colossal. To fully see something, Murali’s poems begin to suggest, we must also inhabit it. And to inhabit something, we must look beyond sight. The poems now enter fuller sensory experiences, of smell, touch and sound. Formally, too, they leap in different directions, between mythology and mathematical equations, news and fantasy, ghazals and lines fractured by symbols. Most striking is the breath between Murali’s words — her lines run over, and into each other so that when they finally complete themselves, the punctuation gives us space to ponder the immensity of what we have witnessed.”
— Poorna Swami in the Hindu BLink
