Book Two of the THOTJBAP series

by Renee Sarojini Saklikar

Book Cover: Bramah's Quest
Editions:Paperback
ISBN: 9780889714304

The year is 2087 and the time-travelling demigoddess, Bramah, a locksmith, is back on planet Earth, helping seed savers and resisters survive climate change and global inequality. Bramah is on a quest to find her people, including the little boy Raphael, last seen at the end of Bramah and the Beggar Boy (2021). Hailed as “brilliant and masterful, timely” (Kerry Gilbert), this epic fantasy in verse connects readers to themes of eco-catastrophe, injustice and resilience.

Published:
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Genres:
Excerpt:

Moon Song at High Tide

Of your many losses, colloidal face:
scars turned to night-river reflections, fierce
polluted waters, effluent, old mills
speaking in an undertow dialect.
Of your many losses, sly grinning face
shredding clouds, rushing against that other
face that is no face, far future, oak box
blackened with trouble, ground into granite
empty and full, filled with discarded dreams.
My heart, no cedar-lined hope chest, clambers
empty and full, fragrant lost seasons call
words into signs, six-sided, pushing waves
time’s current forward, back, of many lost.
My heart rests in your laughing waters, gone.

Reviews:Stephen Collis, author and Simon Fraser University English professor on https://www.sfu.ca/people/scollis/ wrote:

"How is the long poem made long? Renee Sarojini Saklikar’s cubist epic THOT J BAP fits jewelled tesserae to jewelled tesserae, thereby unbinding knots, picking cosmic locks, and unleashing story-seeds scattered across entangled revolutionary times. In this she expresses the longing of the long poem—the yearning after World and World Making, the resistance to conclusion, and the musical inclusion of everything the poet is able to include. This is the first epic poem of climate change: the future is already being sung into the record."


About the Author

Renée Sarojini Saklikar is the author of five books, including the award-winning Children of Air India and Listening to the Bees. Her poetry, essays and short fiction have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including Exile Editions, Chatelaine, The Capilano Review, and Pulp Literature. The latest volume of her epic fantasy in verse, Bramah’s Quest, is forthcoming with Nightwood Editions in 2023. She was poet laureate for the City of Surrey 2015–2018 and volunteers for Event magazine, Meet the Presses collective, Surrey International Writers Conference and Poetry in Canada . Renée Sarojini teaches creative writing and editing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and hosts Lunch Poems at SFU.  Find out more https://thecanadaproject.wordpress.com/