The City Under the City

Over a period of two years, John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil wrote call-and-response poems from whichever part of the world they happened to be in. This book tracks the poets’ engagement with various cities around the world, across the decades, in positive, negative and tangential ways, in recollection and in real time. This is poetry open to the experience of ‘foreign’ places, so that the foreign becomes immediate, intimate and familiar. Unexpected resonances occur, for it is also a work of addiction and recovery, of confrontation and meditation, and the understanding that if language is a virus, it is also the cure.

The City under the City is urgent and necessary reading, looking over and under, excavating memory for loss and revelation.