In their transcending debut, Jhani Randhawa posits an alternative figuration for the post-modern self—one untethered by oppressive regimes marked by systems of silence—and gives us a body that transforms itself into a site of resistance by bearing witness to our living. Randhawa will be in conversation with Teo Rivera-Dundas.
A collection of experiments, mechanical dream logs, epistolaries, and field notes, Time Regime — winner of the 2021 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize — assembles an emergent mutant body intent on interrupting neoliberal imperialism’s rhythms and expectations. Disassembling and reassembling the marginalized body through the intersecting lenses of ecofeminism and necrosociality, the poems in Time Regime form a poetic fugue that defies regimes of purity and correctness, in an historical epoch demarcated by violence, discipline, and erasure. Time Regime traces the lives, ecological contexts, and dreams of multiple beings— rice germ, red ticks, a grandmother’s skin cells, limestone deposits, machine intelligence, shaggy language, the poet, no-self, or the mythological winged cow Surabhi—as they collide and float in parallel vectors. Displaced and seeking, these spectral and material bodies erode and recombine at the edges of domestic ruin, ecological collapse, and state-sanctioned death, delivering an image of presence that seeks communion with mess.