Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize, Best Book of Poetry, 2014

Whether in the heart of downtown Toronto, a bookstore in Boston, the courtyard of the Taj Mahal--through the portals of cyberspace--on the banks of a Tampa river, or a journey through time to Georgetown, an old colonial capital, love circumscribes everything. But this book is no wide-eyed outpouring; it probes and questions concepts and beliefs, pokes fun at age, companions taken for granted, and the realization that, like a mannequin in a Manhattan storefront, love is "faceless and, almost, raceless." If love circumscribes everything, these poems show that everything--economics, politics, ambitions and exiles--also circumscribes love.

Sasenarine Persaud's profile page

Born in Guyana, Sasenarine Persaud is the originator of the term Yogic Realism, his literary aesthetics. He has published essays in Critical Practice (New Delhi), World Literature Today (Oklahoma), and Brick (Toronto) on Yogic Realism. Over three decades of research into, and a lifelong engagement with, Indian philosophies, yoga, art, languages and music, along with his community's 184 years domicile in the Americas, distinguishes his craft from his contemporaries. He has lived in Canada and now makes his home in Florida.

"[T]he poet's mastery of the English language is underwritten by ancestral histories and myths. Love is age-old and universal . . . Persaud is a poet of precise language, of the finely-honed meaning . . ." --Wasafiri

"Persaud's poems are spiced with the imagery of his ancestral India--Hindu gods, rituals, lavish epics, and seductive flowers . . . Persaud seems both haunted and inspired by the notion that America shelters so few who have any true ancestral claim to the place . . . Reading Persaud's verse, it's hard not to feel, and in any way be heartened by, the sense that each one of us is, in one way or another, an exile." --Bostonia