Book Review: The Biography of the Bloodless Battles by Kabir Deb

Wani Nazir reviews Kabir Deb’s latest poetry collection, The Biography of the Bloodless Battles ( Pen Prints, 2024).

What a strange and wiggly thing is late postmodern poetry? Kabir Deb is the author of Biography of the Bloodless Battles. It does not merely play with that slipping world–it takes its throat, and turns it around and round, and laughs at you because you are endeavoring to follow it. Do you care to read a warm thing? Forget it. It is a book not about tea and blankets. You cannot afford to sit back and reflect on things at a distance.   No, it throws you about, face-first into a mad whirlwind of words, bodies, prisons, cut wounds, and tied-up hair.  It is a gorgeous mess where nothing remains within its own side. That tidy sense of self? Gone. The reason is another, and it is not continuous; it is changeable, and is more or less alive, as is the case with Deb.

It seems to be doing so cleverly, not foolishly, and addressing Lyotard and his incredulity towards metanarratives.   When you were French, it was as though you had all at once stooped to race about in these great little, tatty tales– petits recits.  Pain and a strange way that life wouldn’t smile at you, shake your hand, or tie itself up in a neat little bow. These are not poems which in any sense are trying to be such things as notes at all—but rather like a man going after smoke with a butterfly net: slick, brief, and all raw. It is not the issue the disorder is, but the point. Deb knows that emotions are a train crash, and he simply lets it run.