Treasurer of Piggy Banks

The selected poems of contemporary Indian writer Vinod Kumar Shukla, translated from Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

"In the confusion of leaving home,
I leave it so far behind that everywhere I go
I'm seen as an infiltrator.
Infiltrator or inhabitant?"

Infiltrator or inhabitant? In TREASURER OF PIGGY BANKS, Shukla sees the world through both lenses at once. All details are local yet canonical. We are uprooted and yet everywhere roots are spreading far and wide. Shukla illuminates what is hardest to comprehend with aphoristic and surreal clarity, from environmental collapse, to the way our own deaths are snug inside our lives.

The poems are translated from Hindi with deft humor and acrobatic muscle by poet and essayist Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who writes in his introduction that Shukla's lines are so unique to him, "you could put them on a check, and it will be honored at any literary bank." You can't hoard or even spend the wealth of the lines in this collection, but the shiny, slippery, and threatened value of the world accrues through them.