Author Description

Review Here are poems burnished by unquiet rage, fragments of subtle humor drenched in irony and sorrow. Here are lyrical forms gleaming with wry intelligence and a fierce originality. Here is a collection poised to snap you out of your daydreams and into an alert wonder about this strange, familiar world. --Elizabeth Rosner, author of Electric City and Gravity There are women and girls out there who are lost on a highway, who resort to the wiles of fairies and wicked stepmothers; to vengeful exes and adoring aunts. The road trip of Gas & Food, No Lodging travels the interstate of precise form, indelible language, and a music that rivals the wind. Devi Laskar has created a tryptic of dreams that is interpreted through mythologies as beloved as Persephone and Scheherazade and as twisted and as misfit as rubberneckers on a highway and dieters in a support group. Beneath the hardened images lay a loneliness underscored by a foreignness--not just to the country, the state, the road in-between, but also to the family and to the self. Devi Laskar says in Unanswered/Untranslatable/ "Memory is praise and plundered..." and in this solid and indelible collection, memory is also vexing and determined. Every word, every stanza, every verse holds strong. --Elmaz Abinader, Author, This House, My Bones Devi S. Laskar is a poet who deserves wider readership. She's been toiling in the fields of poetry for many years now yielding poems that explore American culture in conflict with her Indian cultural identity; her woman self; and her need to write. Writing transforms her complicated modern life allowing in the mythic from Persephone to Ra. In her witty and masterful poem, "The All-Saints, GA, Overeaters Support Group/meeting #18" food connects to a variety of myths regarding the body, community and memory--from watermelons to pomegranates. The title poem, "Gas & Food, No Lodging" shows the poet in full American trope: "No one comes in to loiter