Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You

Over and again, she leaps and lands. In Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You, Meena Kandasamy vaults from blunt complaint to lyric evocation to caustic quip:

Neoliberalism is not a word
that belongs in any poem, I reason
while I paint my toenails red, wear kohl
and wait for my lover who kisses me,
always, on the eyelids first.

With a cerebral poise reminiscent of Paul Celan, she navigates a torrent of shapeshifting images, as in “We Are Learning by Heart”:

I dig into Tamil, looking for whiteness—
the colour of conch-shells, a name for Venus,
and everyone’s easy guess: emptiness.
A parasite, it rode on cleanliness & purity,
latched on to brightness & brilliance, light
& lustre. It was also unspeakable shame
speaking for itself: a woman’s lovesickness
that left her skin pale; the pallor of illness;
something superficial, never profound;
in poetry, a discordant note or sound;
in people, the ignorant, the guileless,
the one lacking anyone.

The ascetics Chennai-born Kandasamy knows from childhood were aiming, through austerity, for paradise. But in Britain, forced deprivation has resulted in the “austerity victim,” those “fucked-by-the-system and driven-to-destitution,” like the man “walking with three white rabbits inside a supermarket trolley.” When thinking through citizenship, she lays bare the discriminatory nature of nationhood. The plural voice of “We Are Not the Citizens” declares: “We are not the subjects of anyone,” and identifies as “Nobody’s citizens and nobody’s slaves.”

Her assertions enact her own durability. “#ThisPoemWillProvokeYou” concludes:

This poem is pornographic.
This poem will not tender an unconditional apology.
This poem will not be Penguined.
This poem will not be pulped.

The succinct clarity of Kandasamy’s poems, free from prevarication and dissemblance, is invigorating. Of language, she writes, “In that land of words where I handcraft / my dreams, we do not have alphabets / that disappear into silences.” Instead, “the only rule: / what you see is what you say— / nothing seen goes unsaid.”