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Today's poem is "Elegy"
from Phantom Camera

New Issues Poetry & Prose

Jaswinder Bolina is the author of Carrier Wave, winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry. His recent work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Offending Adam, and in the Best American Poetry 2011. He currently teaches at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.

Other poems by Jaswinder Bolina in Verse Daily:
January 4, 2008:   "You'll See a Sailboat" "See the punk-haired bush as a stout little argument between..."

Books by Jaswinder Bolina:

Other poems on the web by Jaswinder Bolina:
"My Face Instead of the Virgin Mary"
Two poems
"Municipal Vistas"
"Course in General Linguistics"
"Denouement"
"In My Bright Autocracy"

Jaswinder Bolina's Website.

About Phantom Camera:

"Jaswinder Bolina's second book of poetry is a stunning performance, as beautiful, accomplished, and memorable as any volume of poetry I've had the pleasure of reading. Arriving at the last poem in this fine work, all I could feel was a hunger for more, and the deepest gratitude for Bolina's rare intellectual and artistic gifts"
—Charles Johnson

"Phantom Camera searches for ways to escape the traps of autobiographical self-absorption while retaining the warmth and energy of personal narrative. Bolina's speakers are often melancholy and estranged, yet charmingly ironic about their estrangement. Drama—both funny and touching—arises from their efforts to stay safe while longing for human connection."
—Mark Halliday

"'I understand how near you are to the tipping. I understand how the sensation is of moving very quickly as if along a high scaffolding where the danger is in becoming too conscious of the easy, animal rhythms of walking. You’re trying not to over-think it and you’re trying not to not think of it either.' Addressing us from 'this precise moment in America' at which 'the nation is a hallway all vanishing point no conclusion,' Bolina proves to be a virtuoso at ontological standup comedy—or is it elegy?—as his lyric riffs hit 'the crease in [the] brain where the self accumulates.' These are poems that will retain their intensity unto many re-readings."
—Claire Bateman



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