Could You Please, Please Stop Singing?

In Could You Please, Please Stop Singing, Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag takes a step away from skepticism, blending humour with shock and surprise, seeking a return to childhood in “Mamuda’s Fries,” innocence in “Conversations with the Country Activist” and fractals for the future in the yet to be invented “Seedless Avocado.” In attempting what Tomas Transromer calls “walking through walls,” Nag hurts and sickens himself with awe and rage. The title poem “Could You Please, Please Stop Singing?” purposely evokes the famous Hemingway line from Men Without Women and is central to the overall tonality of this collection, that straddles a path alternately mocking and dead serious, and that occasionally yields to contrary pulls between the banal and the sublime.

Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag’s first collection of poems, Bloodlines, was published in 2006. He lives in Mississauga with his wife and son. Nag immigrated to Canada from Calcutta, where he was born, and many of the poems in this collection are about this city. The city’s voices offer a wide cast of characters, ranging from the cotton fluffer, the graffitist, the house help, the processionist, the busker and the bomb maker. These voices all earnestly seek to explain and answer, discovering what they feared was lost. In that respect, Nag’s poems are about voyaging into emptiness and returning with a piece of cloud mistook for cotton candy.