Time Regime: Poems

"Spectrally luminous." -Dorothy Wang, Professor and Program Chair, Williams College



Finalist of the 92nd California Book Awards

The winner of the 2021 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.

 

A collection of experiments, mechanical dream logs, epistolaries, and field notes, Time Regime assembles an emergent mutant body intent on interrupting neoliberal imperialism's rhythms and expectations.



Disassembling and reassembling the (marginalized) body through the intersecting lenses of ecofeminism and necrosociality, the poems in Time Regime form a poetic fugue that defies regimes of purity and correctness, in an historical epoch demarcated by violence, discipline, and erasure. 

 

Reflecting Jhani Randhawa's distinct post-deconstructionist impulse, Time Regime navigates the multiplicities of history, time, embodiment, and language to explore queer* phenomenology; postindustrial longing; ritual; and economic, ecological, and spiritual precarity. Time Regime traces the lives, ecological contexts, and dreams of multiple beings- rice germ, red ticks, a grandmother's skin cells, limestone deposits, machine intelligence, shaggy language, the poet, no-self, or the mythological winged cow Surabhi-as they collide and float in parallel vectors. Displaced and seeking, these spectral and material bodies erode and recombine at the edges of domestic ruin, ecological collapse, and state-sanctioned death, delivering an image of presence that seeks communion with mess. 

 

In their transcending debut, Jhani Randhawa posits an alternative figuration for the post-modern self-one untethered by oppressive regimes marked by systems of silence-and gives us a body that transforms itself into a site of resistance by bearing witness to our living.