Cover Art: Diana Al-Hadid, Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 104 pages, 6” X 8”
November 2015, ISBN 978-1-936919-33-8
About Jay Desphande
Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger (YesYes Books), named one of the top debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers. He has received fellowships or support from Kundiman, Civitella Ranieri, Vermont Studio Center, Saltonstall Arts Colony, and the Key West Literary Seminar, where Billy Collins selected him for the 2015 Scotti Merrill Memorial Award. Poems have appeared in Boston Review, Narrative, The Offing, Prelude, the PEN Poetry Series, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. His journalism and essays have been published in Slate, The New Republic, and The Guardian, among others. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
Love the Stranger by Jay Deshpande
About Love the Stranger
Finalist, Debulitzer Poetry Prize, 2016
One of Poets & Writers Top 10 Debuts of 2015
Included in Literary Hub's "30 Must-Read Poetry Debuts from 2015"
Luna Luna Magazine's "40 Books Published in 2015 That Should Be On Your Shelf"
Three poems from Love the Stranger included in Boston Review's Top Poems of 2015
This is a book of great beauty and of terrible suspicion regarding that beauty. This is a poet of intensifying linguistic gift and of terrible suspicion regarding that gift. Is there, yet, an Auto-Voyeuristic school of poetry? If not, then Jay Deshpande’s troubling and gorgeous Love the Stranger—“watch yourself grow muscle in your failure/and hate it”—could be the founding document.
—Josh Bell, No Planets Strike
Through the wide-eyed study of beauty and the eerie stations of the erotic, Love the Stranger maps the body in its struggle with desire and absence. Deshpande’s poems treat love, kinship, and loss as instruments of our own awakening—tools that can help us encounter our own mysteriousness and touch new ground. As they peer into childhood memory, the end of an affair, dream dismemberments, and even Kim Kardashian, the lyrics in Love the Stranger guide us toward the truths hidden within the body.
Reviews & Interviews
Review by Dana Isokawa at Poets & Writers
Interview at Brooklyn Poets
Interview at Blunderbuss Magazine
