Marked by acute alertness to the specific in the lived and the living, Jessica Mookherjee's writing, as the poems below attest, is writing of people and place par excellence, where wandering through the past is a way of living on. Through the reimagining of intimate tales and encounters of both migrants and citizens in London, in geographies spanning people's homes, alleys, pubs, railway lines, and the road, Mookherjee both maps and memorializes afresh the lives of those involved, not only in name but also in body. It is precisely through these spectral and real accumulations of details, as Mookherjee so powerfully asserts, that remembering happens and the voices, primarily of women, are heard unfiltered. Uncompromisingly autonomous and crafted in a multi-textural English that places the individual, and her difference—linguistically and physically—at its heart from the onset, these extraordinary poems recalibrate the reader's pulses in their sheer brilliance at capturing what it means, and entails, to continuously return to people and place in writing.
Yousif M. Qasmiyeh
Creative Encounters Editor
Selections from Desire Lines
Risk Ways
Filch the filth in N7, derelict Irishman, bottles of Guinness, seventies carpets. Hides out there at the World's End, at the Nag's Head. New light morning, dirt like nothing ever seen before, smell of stale tobacco falling into pub floors. She nicks bottles of Martini, incense, a black and white TV, a book on Lou Reed, with a stolen credit card. Card sharp. Be local, have a joke with the veterans propping up the bar, walls become glass. She's huckster with her slick back hair gel and mod tucker, practise spells, spelling, and magic tricks, bit-faker blabbing for a break, all hokum-cokum and cold coffee left out all night, with roaches and Marlboro Lights.