The City under the City : Poems by Jeet Thayil & John Kinsella [Hardcover]

'A book for all time' - Karthika Nair, author of Until the Lions

Over 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 both positive and negative ways, as well as in 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 an urgent and necessary reading, looking over and under, excavating memory for loss and revelation.