Small Hands

by Mona Arshi

Overview

Mona Arshi's debut collection, Small Hands, introduces a brilliant and compelling new voice. At the center of the book is the slow detonation of grief after her brother's death but her work focuses on the whole variety of human experience: pleasure, hardship, tradition, energised by language which is in turn both tender and risky. Often startling as well as lyrical, Arshi's poems resist fixity; there is a gentle poignancy at work here which haunt many of the poems. This is humane poetry. Arshi's is a daring, moving and original voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781381816
Publisher:	Liverpool University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2015
Series:	Pavilion Poetry LUP
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 4.40(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Mona Arshi was born to Punjabi Sikh parents in West London where she still lives. She initially trained as a lawyer and worked for Liberty, the UK human rights organisation for several years, undertaking test case litigation under the Human Rights Act. She began writing poetry in 2008 and received a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She won the inaugural Magma Poetry competition in 2011 and was on the Complete Works Program, a scheme funded by the Arts Council. Mona was joint winner of the Manchester Creative writing poetry prize in 2014.

Table of Contents

The Lion
Entomological Specimens
Practicing Your Skills
Insomniac
What Every Girl Should Know Before Marriage
Taster
Bad Day in the Office
You Are Not
My Mother's Hair
The Gold Bangles
'Jesus Saves'
Ticking
On Ellington Road
Cousin Migrant
The Daughters
Different Principles of Enclosure
Day Ghost
This Morning
The Bird
Almost September
Phone Call on a Train Journey
Small Hands
In the Coroner's Office
April
18th of November
Notes Towards an Elegy
The Urn
The Rain That Began Elsewhere
Gloves
My Father Wants to be a Rooftop Railway Surfer
Ghazal
Ghazal
Ode to a Pomegranate
Bulbul
Parvarti waits for the return of Shiva, after the slaying of Ganesh
Lost Poem
Large and Imprecise Baby
Wireman
Barbule
The Found Thing
Woman at Window
Mr Beeharry's Marriage Bureau
Mrs M Unravels
Ballad of the Small-Boned Daughter
Hummingbird

Editorial Reviews

"It is a testament to Mona Arshi's talent that, after a decade of not reading any poetry at all, her work had me clambering for old anthologies. Of course, little of what I read afterwards was as elegant, moving, haunting or true. Nothing less than Britain's most promising writer."—Sathnam Sanghera, The Times

"There is an extraordinary keenness, sharpness, poignancy and precision in Mona Arshi's poems. They deal with loss, pleasure and the sheer particularities of life with striking grace, constituting something like 'an erotics of the spirit', tenderly and imaginatively taking apart and reassembling language, registering everything necessary. Time and again she hits the perfect note. It is rare to find a first book as beautiful as this."—George Szirtes

"Deliciously varied in form and approach, tone and voice, Mona Arshi's poems display a tantalising 'instability' - each one prismatic and glittering. She opens a clear, suggestive window onto many aspects of life and inner life, on her cultural background, for instance, and on the tragic loss of a brother. So often one thinks, pulled up in amazement, 'Where did that come from?' that I'm tempted to the use the word 'genius'."—Moniza Alvi

"Small Hands is a brimming miscellany of poems. [A] prominent and enjoyable aspect of Arshi's work is its sensuality and awareness of the body; this is a collection full of hands, feet, mouths, lips, eyes, wrists, hair and, ubiquitously, skin. [...] Arshi combines a liking for obliqueness, sometimes even coolness, with a desire to push what language can do and a willingness to experiment with form."
Martyn Crusifix

From the Publisher