“THE EPIGRAPH of Amit Majmudar’s new poetry collection Dothead comes from Dr. Seuss: “It is fun to have fun / But you have to know how.””
“Though Seuss’s lines may seem like an unusual touchstone for a book that explores such weighty subjects, they capture a central element of Majmudar’s writing. In Dothead and his previous collections, 0˚, 0˚ and Heaven and Earth, Majmudar reveals himself as a poet for whom nothing is more serious than play, a quality that keeps even his most politically oriented work rooted in poetry rather than polemics.”
“He teases language out of hiding in order to uncover fresh meaning from the startling relationships between words.”
“Addressing poets with whom he shares multiple cultural identities, he urges them to become:
a many-minded mongrel,
the line’s renewal,
self-made and twofold,
soul and dual.”
“Through Majmudar’s punning reference to the “line’s renewal,” in which we discern both an evocation of the poetic “line” and the ancestral “line,” he suggests a link between artistic progress and a creator’s connection to his or her origins.”
““Soul” contains hints of “sole,” an effect that subtly pulls against the word “dual.” Even as the poem encourages “hyphenated poets” to embrace their dual selves, Majmudar implies that the intactness of one’s soul depends on preventing those selves from losing their distinction. Of course, we also hear “duel” in “dual,” further heightening our sense of the poets’ struggle.”
“If his emphasis on linguistic play is an unusual trait among American poets of his generation (Majmudar was born in 1979), it’s far from the only quality that sets him apart. He has attained cross-genre success with the publication of two acclaimed novels, Partitions and The Abundance, and he earns his living as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist.”
“His medical background informs his poetry in salient ways. In the final image of “Training Course,” Majmudar evokes the human longing for spiritual presence amid the seemingly objective world of science: “Trainee places left hand on switch, right hand on heart, / And waits for monkey, preoccupied with naked tube light, to meet eyes.””
““Logomachia,” a 16-page poem in sections, centers on the relationship between scientific knowledge and faith. Majmudar describes the experience of holding up an x-ray for examination: “Each pixel: a point geometry / defines dimensionless, no height, no width, no death.” By replacing the expected word “depth” with “death,” he spurs us to consider what may be missing when we allow the methods of science to overly determine our lives. The facts of a diagnosis, he suggests, don’t necessarily allow us to grasp mortality.”
“Throughout Dothead, we watch Majmudar make and deftly break patterns as he invents nonce forms and engages with established formal modes in innovative ways. Yet he also explores the risks and limitations of an art that relies too much on technical acumen.”
“Apart from its formal brilliance, Dothead is also defined by Majmudar’s emphasis on inherited cultural narratives, particularly those associated with religion, mythology, art, and classical literature.”
““Abecedarian,” a stunning 11-page prose poem, offers a retelling of the Adam and Eve tale focused on oral sex, interspersing their relationship with his own adolescent sexual explorations.”
“In “The Enduring Appeal of the Western Canon,” Majmudar prompts us to question the interaction between reality and mythos in the stories we receive about revered canonical figures and celebrated works of art.”
“His blending of language from the Bible with childhood’s nursery-rhyme cadences underscores one of the piece’s most disturbing suggestions: that gun worship has long possessed a religious fervor in American society, and that children often absorb the most devastating impacts of this phenomenon, both as firearm acolytes created in the image of the adults around them and as victims of gun violence.”
“These lines show us one of the United States’s best poets at his best. Through a combination of mixed diction and syntactical mock-grandeur, both of which intensify the play of linguistic humor against serious content, Majmudar achieves a tonal complexity that enhances the closing couplet’s devastating impact.”
“Caitlin Doyle is an Elliston Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where she teaches in the department of English and Comparative Literature.”