Sasenarine Persaud

"Miami and Toronto are the most insistent geographical coordinates of this passionate sequence of love poems, though Sasenarine Persaud infuses them with his own Caribbean and Hindu traditions. What is exotic about his poetry is not the Indian/West Indian content - the naturalized instress of his North American life - but rather technique ignited by adoration. So sentences fold together or release into each other, words grow into compounds, multiples, "Hindiwatercoconutfilmvendorheorine" being the most capacious. Experience and language are elasticized, time and space collapse into a new flow, under the transforming influence of the lover. A Surf of Sparrows' Songs is a sensuous verbal feast."--Stan Dragland (Then, poetry editor McClelland & Stewart (Toronto)& Professor of English, University of Western Ontario).

"[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 . . ."
— Geoffrey Heptonstall, 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."—Susan Seligson, Bostonia