These are angry poems. Not in their tone, nor even necessarily in their choice of words, but rather in their extended meditations on knowledge, migration, feminism, and violence. They induce and celebrate anger (the closing lines of Arrival read: “And though her aunt and father are dead,/I wish her strength to break the rhyme/ Of Reason divorced from all time,/ I wish her sight to see the danger,/I wish her will, I wish her anger!”), which marks a welcome return to one of the primary functions of literature —

to provoke thought about subjects mired in apathy. Their beautiful images ask the reader what s/he sees, and what has been occluded in order to make that sight possible. So, for instance, the arresting opening poem in the collection, Backwoods, states: “…She sees/blindly. She’s forgotten much:/Entire histories of temple, mosque,/sarai where once many futures met Now/and now one past is touted/like a public secret of sacred stone.” The writing of poetry in this instance is also clearly (about) the writing of history — what is the relation of the past to the present? On what basis do we confidently assert knowledge in the present? How has that knowledge been produced? By whom, for whom, and where?
In his preface to Man of Glass, Tabish Khair notes that the poems are situated in three separate yet related spheres: the first section is based on Kalidasa’s 5th-century Sanskrit play Abhijnana Shakuntalam (The Recognition of Shakuntala), the second on Ghalib’s 19th-century Urdu ghazals, and the last on Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th-century fairy tales. Though claiming to be set in an India of Hindu and Muslim classics, and a Denmark of fairy tales, the missing geo-political setting in these poems is the United States of America. Mentioned by name only once in the collection, America nonetheless haunts many of the concerns in this book. Poems about the Iraq War, immigration, the production of knowledge premised on the GRE, TOEFL, GMat, all combine to bring into focus, mostly without being explicitly named, the big bad wolf. In Forms, another terrific poem, the wolf is named for the only time: “America sleeps soundly with no voice/to wake it to the murder of sleep.”
But while these poems evoke vast landscapes, named and barely named, of space and time, I wonder at the need for dividing it into these three sections. Certainly, the poems share an interest in ideas of loss and longing, home and away, duty and desire, but could they not have been allowed to breathe under those rubrics? As it stands, the division into sections on Kalidasa, Ghalib, and Andersen, feels a bit heavy-handed and strained — dreamt up for the blurb rather than for anything more significant. Without it, the conceptual ties would still carry the volume on its poetic strengths.
Indeed, the subtlety with which the world is combed for linked stories is breathtaking. In his rendition of The Little Mermaid, for example, a poem titled Immigrant, Khair captures with stunning beauty and poignancy the experience of movement that marks so many of us in the post-colonial world:
“It hurts to walk on new legs:
The curse of consonants, the wobble of vowels. And you for whom I gave up a kingdom
Can never love the thing I was.
When you look into my past You see Only Weeds and scales.
Once I had a voice.
Now I have legs.
Sometimes I wonder
Was it fair trade?”

The language of loss, brought together over centuries and geographies, genders and religions, ways and means, give this collection of poems an intensity that its slimness might not otherwise suggest. The breakable man of glass, fragile and precarious, for whom the volume is named, is nowhere in evidence in the poems themselves, assured and glittering as they are.

Madhavi Menon is associate professor of literature at American University, Washington, DC. She works on Shakespeare and queer theory.