Dothead - 9781101947074

The acclaimed poet and novelist--a fierce and original voice--now joins the Knopf list with a captivating, no-holds-barred collection of new poems.

Dothead is an exploration of selfhood both intense and exhilarating. Within the first pages, Amit Majmudar asserts the claims of both the self and the other: the title poem shows us the place of an Indian American teenager in the bland surround of a mostly white peer group, partaking of imagery from the poet's Hindu tradition; the very next poem is a fanciful autobiography, relying for its imagery on the religious tradition of Islam. From poems about the treatment of people who look like Majmudar at the airport ("my dark unshaven brothers / whose names overlap with the crazies and God-fiends") to a long, freewheeling abecedarian poem about Adam and Eve and the discovery of oral sex, Dothead is both a profoundly satisfying cultural critique and a thrilling experiment in language. United across a wide range of tones and forms, the poems inhabit and explode multiple perspectives, finding beauty in every one.