Infamous Landscapes

Prageeta Sharma writes of the experiences of a class-displaced, first-generation Hindoo Romantic, and her landscapes and language follow cannily and whimsically from that position. An exploration of the compatibility of human desire with personal ethics is at the heart of Infamous Landscapes , whose voices work both with and against a perceived Wordsworthian innocence. In these poems, Sharma turns away from Romanticism with a certain disconcerted, feminine shame, one that finds her peering through an enculturated, gendered lens. The landscapes of these poems are urban and, natural, in as much as Sharma’s third, runs an emotional gamut from fear to fervor in a landscape both external and internal, cast in hysterics and hermeneutics. Next, I pull down that lonely flag. Why was it waving to you?