Dothead

A captivating, no-holds-barred collection of new poems from an acclaimed poet and novelist with a fierce and original voice

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 at the airport of people who look like Majmudar (“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 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.

AMIT MAJMUDAR is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Dublin, Ohio, with his wife and three children. His poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry (2007, 2012), The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–2012, Poetry, Poetry Daily, and several other venues, including the eleventh edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature. His first poetry collection, 0º, 0º, was a finalist for the 2009 Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. His second poetry collection, Heaven and Earth, won the 2011 Donald Justice Prize. The first poet laureate for the state of Ohio, Majmudar blogs for the Kenyon Review and is also a critically acclaimed novelist.

www.amitmajmudar.com