‘A riveting voice.’ — Arundhathi Subramaniam
‘Sharp and tensile.’ — Akhil Katyal
‘Sexy, brainy, unrelenting.’ — Paromita Vohra
‘Anti-serious, anti-hierarchical, irreverent, playful.’ — Tejaswini Niranjana
‘An important body of contemporary Tamil poetry and antipoetry.’ — Pratik Kanjilal
‘A significant poetic collection.’ — Mani Rao
‘[Brings] to the rest of segregated India something that was never accessible before.’— Buku Sarkar
A good poem
does not seek love
It seeks only
to write itself
Perundevi’s poems and antipoems sidestep and overturn entrenched literary conventions even as they seek to ‘enlarge the scope of what may enter a poem’.
All manner of sentient beings—humans, animals, birds, fish and insects—and a teeming variety of objects, including smartphones, drones, luggage trolleys, sex toys, wine glasses and flowerpots, share equal space in Perundevi’s poetic field, continually acting upon one another. Imbued with the richness and complexity of this relational life, her poems give expression, perhaps for the first time, to situations and feelings that are familiar yet ineffable to most of us.
In N. Kalyan Raman’s measured translation, the dry wit and sharp-edged irony of Perundevi’s poetry pin readers to the wall and force them to confront some profound truths about our world. Prophetic and bold, these poems, selected from eight collections published in Tamil over the last two decades, will stay with you long after you have read them.
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Perundevi says, ‘Writing is not a bid for canonical endurance but an immediate act: in it, the poet recedes, the “I” becomes another, and language opens pathways life’s one-way road can never offer, namely alternate possibilities of being, here and there, now and then.’
N. Kalyan Raman says, ‘What drew me to Perundevi’s poetry was her attempt to bring the art form closer to the real world through her language and imagination, and her refusal to be bound by convention. It compelled me to be inventive in my turn and create a new utterance that will, I hope, find its own mode of belonging in its new home.’
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EARLY PRAISE FOR When You Whirl Round and Round
‘“It is what it is”, until Perundevi turns the quotidian tragicomedies into poems. Suddenly, our mice begin to growl with courage. Perundevi’s poems are our conscience. So long as we let ourselves hear their persistent voice, we know that we exist and have not ceded all the ground. N. Kalyan Raman’s translation catches Perundevi’s wit and cunning simplicity with unbelievable smoothness and a natural flair. This is a significant poetic collection from contemporary Tamil poetry.’—Mani Rao
‘A riveting voice, capable of asking questions in the way that only poetry can—about erased women and irresponsible gods, smartphones and violet hair dyes. These spare and elegant translations by N. Kalyan Raman ensure that this voice reaches us in all its quirkiness and resonance. Perundevi deserves to be read. Pick up this book.’
—Arundhathi Subramaniam
‘Anti-serious, anti-hierarchical, irreverent, playful, invested in upside-downism, Perundevi’s antipoems draw on every aspect of daily life. No experience, big or small, is excluded from her writing in which human and non-human, nature and technology, living and dead, co-exist. But the experiencing “I”, the I in her poems, she disarmingly calls a poetic convenience, a bottle-gourd shell, an empty Coke can. The female tongue she deploys is “our pact with freedom”, and it shies away from proffering judgement or moral command. From philosophical abstraction to pomegranate to parakeet to screensaver, these stunning poems are like pebbles skimmed across a stream. N. Kalyan Raman’s superb translation captures this movement.’—Tejaswini Niranjana
‘Perundevi’s poems never let you rest. They are made up of so many sudden bends in meaning, tone and image that you’re always left both bemused and breathless. Consolation is not on her agenda, unlike so many other poets. She seeks to throw you in a pitiless entropy and you willingly follow. N. Kalyan Raman’s translation, sharp and tensile, maps her irreverence and her contemporariness without a single snag.’—Akhil Katyal
‘The poetry of the ordinary, composed in the idiom of everyday speech, looks deceptively simple. But conveying simplicity across languages and cultures often presents tremendous difficulties. In translating Perundevi, N. Kalyan Raman has risen to the challenge and given the world access to an important body of contemporary Tamil poetry and antipoetry.’—Pratik Kanjilal
‘Like films, songs and personal questions from mysterious strangers, these sexy, brainy, unrelenting poems take no prisoners and leave no crumbs. Primeval death pulses inside cinematic still-life images and tenderness arrives sharp and piercing, insisting you laugh. N. Kalyan Raman’s rapt, stylish translation makes us alive to the sensual and cerebral thrill of the things that languages, much like lovers, can do to each other undercover in a poem.’—Paromita Vohra
‘N. Kalyan Raman is the finest translator of Tamil literature I’ve encountered. And in his beautiful endeavours, from Ashokamitran to Murugan and now Perundevi, he has brought to the rest of segregated India something that was never accessible before.’—Buku Sarkar
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Perundevi is a contemporary Tamil poet whose work also encompasses fiction, translation, literary criticism and academic scholarship. Since the publication of her first poetry collection, Tiyuraittukkam, in 1998, she has published nine more volumes, most recently Avan Kannattil Hybrid Sevvarali Pukkirathu (2022). Known for her distinctive practice of antipoetry, she brings colloquial speech, humour, irony, tonal shifts and the absurd into poems that engage with everyday life and the shifting contours of ‘modern’ subjectivity across urban, political, technological and media worlds.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
N. Kalyan Raman is a translator of contemporary Tamil fiction and poetry into English. Over the past twenty-five years, he has published translations of fifteen works of Tamil fiction by important writers such as Ashokamitran, Poomani, Devibharathi, Perumal Murugan, Vaasanthi and Salma, and earlier in 2026, the memoir of T.S.S. Rajan, a freedom fighter. His translations of contemporary Tamil poets have been published widely in journals and anthologies in India and abroad. The present volume is his first book-length translation of poetry.
Paperback/Fiction/ Poetry /192 pp /INR 399
Releasing On 27October 2026
