Wince: Poems
by Umit Singh Dhuga
With the lexical bravura and formal agility that have become hallmarks of Umit Singh Dhuga’s poetry, the poems in Wince excavate a lyrical self, animated by familial, political, and racial upheaval. The ensuing risks of vulnerability and exposure are elegantly shaped primarily in sonnets, haiku, and terza rima that range over racism in sports, varieties of disunion wrought by Brexit, and postcolonial detritus and detente in South Asia. Wince marks a coming of age: in meditations on loss as well as the poet’s marriage, the poems illuminate a world remade.
Praise for Wince
“Umit Singh Dhuga’s capacious imagination spans continents and history even as his fastidious language halts cliche at the border. In the resulting blend of distant gaze and intimate scrutiny, Wince is distinguished by the poise and precision of Dhuga’s poetic voice, a voice whose cosmopolitan irony accommodates both elegiac tenderness and moments of piercing beauty.”
—Rachel Hadas, author of Pandemic Almanac
“With dazzling wordplay and surprise turns, Umit Singh Dhuga offers superb poems on the theme of time in his new collection, Wince. Dhuga’s deft deliberations on daily life, from waking up to trying to sleep, from nakedness to regimental dress, wrest seeming opposites together. Haiku, sonnets, and terza rima transport the work through time and space: from Partition to Brexit, from London to Toronto, each poem a capsule filled with the furious energy of loss. Umit Singh Dhuga’s Wince is a subtle, stellar, timely meditation on life and death. ”
—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: Poems
“Umit Singh Dhuga’s Wince is a virtuosic work. His voice weaves through poignance and playfulness to hold a various yet intimate world firmly together, chiefly in sonnets and sonnet cycles. It is a voice that is uniquely and memorably Dhuga’s.”
—George Szirtes, author of Fresh Out of the Sky
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ISBN: 978-1-933974-49-1
$15 US / £12 UK
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