Dothead is Amit Majmudar’s 5th book (and 3rd
collection of poetry). It is far-ranging in its reach and style, perhaps best
described by the heading of its table of contents, “Kedgeree Ingredients.”
Kedgeree, as one unfamiliar with the word (like me) discovers on the page
facing the table of contents (in a photocopy of a dictionary page), is “a mess of rice cooked with butter and dal….” Among other (con) textual surprises
in this book are an opening epigraph from Dr. Seuss- “It is fun to have fun/But
you have to know how,” a passport photo of the author at about age 3 above his book jacket
biosketch, and the title of the final poem in the collection,
“Invocation.” Front and center in a
number of poems is the issue of identity, perhaps most tellingly in the title
poem, “Dothead,” where an Indian-American teenager confronts his white classmates.
In “T.S.A.” the poem’s speaker faces
off against the airport screeners claiming solidarity with :
"my dark unshaven
brothers whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends, ourselves the
goateed other” (p.5)
His identity as a poet is beautifully expressed through
“Steep Ascension,” a poem “for John Hollander” (the epigraph unfortunately is
not included in this volume) that ends:
“But John, I told him, beauty is a
fire those who burn hardest labor coldly for
and I for one will hold your
labors dear, the music of meaning, the artistry that dares to conjure walls
that it might conjure doors” (p.25).
Among his “political” poems, are two about
children: one gunned down ("Lineage") and one abused (“Invocation")” that begins:
“The arms I sing. Forget the man. there is no other epic. Sing the arms of
kids, the ones with pustules all along their veins” (p. 100).
The longest poem, a prose poem, is “Abecedarian”
that weaves together Adam and Eve and the speaker’s discovery of oral sex.
