About the Book: The City under the City
Over a period of two years, John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil wrote
call-and-response poems from whichever part of the world they happened to be in.
This book tracks the poets engagement with various cities around the world,
across the decades, in positive, negative and tangential ways, in recollection
and in real time. This is poetry open to the experience of foreign places, so
that the foreign becomes immediate, intimate and familiar. Unexpected resonances
occur, for it is also a work of addiction and recovery, of confrontation and
meditation, and the understanding that if language is a virus,