Fantasia

by Nisha Ramayya

Fantasia hazards a listening walk through seashells, telecommunication networks, and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. Alice Coltrane's experiments in jazz and spiritual community guide these poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth.

Genres: Poetry

101 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2024

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You are the matter in which splendour is hidden; you are the sculptor who shrouds their work.” There’s so much of value in Nisha Ramayya’s brilliant, original, jazz-inflected collection of poems, Fantasia. Moving between Alice Coltrane’s experimental jazz, the nature of performance and composition, and her own sense of spirituality, Ramayya constructs a kind of poetic soundscape, her words tripping and dancing off the page, into the ear, through the brain. Her poems brim with astonishing turns of phrase: “Her mouth is the apocalypse”, “like acute embarrassment, punchlines have the power to stop time”, “she! generates a party out of mantras!”. Elsewhere her poems ask big and impossible questions: “How would it feel to have a relationship to the past that is not mediated by old photographs?”, “In whose voice did you hear me ask, what’s good? […] What do you remember about that time? Standing with our own kind, forgetting what we'd spent our lives learning about life, amnesia as the condition for progress. What progress?”, and “what if we took an unravelling warp // away from the kernel of bourgeois history […] away from the stranglehold of stories told and retold, only to uphold *oneself*”. Some of Fantasia’s standout poems include ‘liner notes’, ‘blood-roarer, via body’s sympathic’, ‘three for ahmad jamal trio’, ‘muddy rivers (filthy tributaries)’, and ‘Govinda Jai Jai’, but the whole collection is woven together with precision and a kind of divine joy that makes it so repeatedly rewarding.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars