None of this is the city. All of it is you.

In his follow-up to Kalagora, Siddhartha Bose imagines the poet as a 21st-century beatnik, a ravenous language-machine eating up the margins of the city. Dreams trigger extraordinary visions of an apocalyptic London; beat-boxers and graffiti writers as urban oracles; the ghosts of a multicultural city moving through banks and brothels, kebab shops and squat parties. Dispatches from the post-industrial landscapes of the North, and from the poet’s hometowns of Mumbai and Kolkata, complete this raw and uncompromisingly modern collection.

Siddhartha Bose is a poet, playwright and performer based in Hackney. His poetry has appeared in Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009; ISBN 9781852248383), Dear World and Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013; ISBN 9781852249496) and the HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (HarperCollins India, 2012; ISBN 9789350290415). His first book, Kalagora, appeared in 2010 from Penned in the Margins (ISBN 9780956546746). Siddhartha has been featured on BBC 4 TV, BBC Radio 3 and was dubbed one of the ’ten rising stars of British poetry’ by the Times. He is a Leverhulme Fellow in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.