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The 44th of July

1st Edition

This is a book about Americans. Not the ones brunching in Park Slope or farming in Wranglers or trading synergies in a boardroom; they are not executives or socialites. They are not the salt of the earth. Nor are they huddled masses yearning to breathe free. These are the others of the everyday, the Americans no one sees. These are the brown and bland ones who understand the good, tough money in working a double, who know which end of a joint to hit. They can find Karachi on a map. They know a shortcut to Ikea. They can land a punchline. These are their poems.
            In The 44th of July, Jaswinder Bolina offers bracing and often humorous reflections on American culture through the lens of an alienated outsider at a deliberately uncomfortable distance that puts the oddities of the culture on full display. Exploring the nuances of life in an America that doesn’t treat you as one of its own, yet whose benefits still touch your life, these exquisitely crafted poems sing in a kaleidoscopic collaging of language the mundane, yet surreal experience of being in between a cultural heritage of migration and poverty and daily life in a discriminatory yet prosperous nation.  Both complicit in global capitalism and victims of the inequality that makes it possible, these are the Americans who are caught in a system with no clear place for them. Bolina opens the space to include the excluded, bringing voice and embodied consciousness to experiences that are essential to Americanness, but get removed from view in the chasms between self and other, immigrant and citizen.

88 pages | 1 halftone | 6 x 9 | © 2019

Poetry


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Reviews

"Cynical, impassioned, and careening into furious flights of fact and fancy, Bolina's third collection is animated by a vision of a trainwrecked America. Though the racism, violence, and consumer culture that Bolina rails against is nothing new, it's impossible not to read this book as a work of activism in protest against the political upheavals of the last two years. And yet, with a finally tuned ear for the music of our Internet Age language, Bolina manages to make it all sort of fun, and even funny. . . .  In some of the darkest and bitterest political poems of our dark and bitter age, Bolina gives voice to the offline rage of those who are screaming to make America good again, if it ever was."

NPR

“Bolina writes socially aware poems mixing aesthetics with politics in emotionally charged language. It is poetry of bridging, connecting, and seeing to retain clarity and evoke awakening. . . . These attentive and subtle poems engage language expressively to address pressing realities, brilliantly demonstrating that poetry is action. Recommended for all poetry readers.”

Library Journal

"Sonically powerful and careful in their word choice, these poems create a musical texture throughout. . . . Bolina’s poems are acute, playful works that precisely capture the surreality of our current political moment.”

Publishers Weekly

"The poems in Jaswinder Bolina's third poetry collection (The 44th of July) are more than 'political poems'--these are poems that are so well made that they sing; they roll off your tongue and strike through your soul.  Listen (from 'Supremacy'): 'the xenophobe fretful I'm somewhere/near, honing my chopsticks, loading/my tortas, my name writ in Gurmukhi,/he fidgets wakeful, fearful I'm awake also/reciting a scripture ruthless as his is/and I am.  I am awake and singing.'"

Victoria Chang, author of Barbie Chang

"The 44th of July offers a crushing critique of the current moment: the breakdown of human feeling and the rise of violence; the global flows of materialism and counter-circulation of refugees; the awful way we whistle while our pretense of democracy burns. But its poems trace these crises with irresistible exuberance and creativity. You will savor Bolina’s ability to walk a thread of language like a tightrope across time and space; you’ll wonder at the bizarre yet familiar worlds his inventive sentences create and inhabit. Jump aboard this merry-go-wrong . . . and hold on."

Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic

"Bolina remains a sincere poet of necessary ironies, and The 44th of July is his opus, his ode to how well our nation falls apart in front of us.  Or, I should say, this book is a proper chronicle of how the ideal of America was never really made whole for all whom it claimed:  'You’ll need/new things you can’t even begin/to Costco, to crate or to barrel./Forget now your kitsch and granite/kitchen, your home depots/and free peoples, the soft power/of a staycation and owning/…the streetlights of your town./This is not your town. Nobody/here woos you…'  These Whitmanian litanies and lovely long sentences mean to include the excluded and even to afford for delight where evil thrives. This is a brilliant book by a masterful poet."

Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

"Cynical, impassioned, and careening into furious flights of fact and fancy, Bolina's third collection is animated by a vision of a trainwrecked America. . . . And yet, with a finally tuned ear for the music of our Internet Age language, Bolina manages to make it all sort of fun, and even funny, in a schadenfreude kind of way."

WBUR News

"His speakers shifts from witness to outsider to stealth transgressor, while his poems move quietly—measured and musical—with rhythms so deft the criticisms and wit unfold unexpectedly. Through his deliberate and attentive forms, he echoes the strategic footwork immigrants and POC master to navigate and survive the United States . . . . His representations of this nation are vivid, chilling and accurate—balanced but made all the more real by the humor."

The Arkansas International

Finalist

2019 Big Other Book Award for Poetry

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