Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag, The Alphabet of Aliens: prose poems

 

The Stopped River

By the time we returned, the river had stopped. It wasn’t a failure of God alone or the ruined robes of preachers. Not the bitter acids in the partisan trench or the cinder in the sibyl’s eyes. Not the shattered spine after the steep climb or the weight of water after centuries of gravity. It was about the manner in which the sun had set. Is there going to be nothing after this? The child was anxious.

When no one listened, he posed his question again and again, his tongue wagging like an ancient church bell. When no one spoke, he cried like someone who had just heard death rattle his mother’s ruined bones. No one knew how to console him.

Then his mother asked for ink, a blank sheet, plain water. Painted a river that shone like a lamp on a rainy afternoon and licked up the pale sky. And in the river, she planted blithe waves. And down the stream, toward the edge of the sheet, she planted a little whirlpool that moved like a furry one-eyed animal. And between the waves, she planted a dark shadow of our sunk history.

The fourth full-length poetry collection, and fifth title overall, by Calcutta-born Mississauga, Ontario-based Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag, is The Alphabet of Aliens: prose poems (Mawenzi House, 2025). Following Bloodlines (2006), Could You Please, Please Stop Singing? (Mosaic Press, 2016) and Uncharted (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2021), the poems across The Alphabet of Aliens blur the boundaries between short prose and lyric, subtitled “prose poems,” but landing, more often than not, in the imperfect designation of flash fiction or postcard stories. “At the corner of South Linn and Washington is a consolation,” opens the piece “The Curry Shop,” “but mostly empty. I entered once but didn’t eat, instead, suffering an immediate deflation upon touching the menu, traded stories, conflating places and times.” I’ve noted previously how the self-declared prose poems of the late Connecticut poet Russell Edson (1935-2014) [see my review of his posthumous selected here], said to be the father of the American prose poem, felt more akin to flash fiction than even the short fictions of writers such as Lydia Davis [see my piece on her work here] and Kathy Fish [see my review of her latest here], so the declared boundaries surrounding prose poems have been blurred for some time. Across seventy-nine individual pieces, each ranging from one to three pages in length, Nag composes a series of first-person narratives, of first-person reports, offering sketch-notes on activity and an interiority, monologues blending observation, commentary and documentary. As the first of the three-sectioned “Place is a Sentence” begins: “To prove you are capable of belonging you had to reveal your place. Since they were busy touching different parts of your tongue you could say nothing else. What is place anyway? The scent of your tilled back garden, someone said, opened a window. And in the strong headwind when you floated up like a shadow of three pasts, they freaked out.”

While themes and subjects thread across and through these pieces, writing insecurity and family, life and death and longevity, fantastic fictions and the small moment, The Alphabet of Aliens is a collection one could dip in and out of at random, each piece set in a locus uniquely itself, but held firmly in place amid this book-length suite. “For a change, I wanted to write a happy poem. One that’d have no nightmares from childhood,” begins the piece “The Seemingly Irreconcilable Differences Between a Happy Poem and a Sad Poem,” “no traces of the failures waking up at five before getting on the highway to clean up past transactions inside a gray cubicle, for bread. Not even the shadow of Ray Carver by the window watching paper boys deliver in the snow.”

“Someone said,” begins the two-page “At a Street Play About the Soul,” “scientists have created a camera to film soul particles as they leave a cold body. It happened yesterday. And as they were being presented the Nobel prize, my mother looked up from her crewel work. But the soul is a slice of sapodilla, she said, sweet when you smell it, stones when you don’t.” His short narratives have a sheen of the surreal and fantastic in short bursts reminiscent of some of the work of Hamilton writer Gary Barwin, for example, or even that of Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany; providing a rather straightforward description or narrative that suddenly takes (sometimes quietly) a surreal turn. Or a turn that suggests all is not what it appears. As the piece “He Was Alone in a Park” begins: “He was alone in a park. We sat shoulder to shoulder, two drunks under a flowering myrtle. Late August, newly arrived, I was looking for work. He wore a pinstripe tux, the kind they rent for weddings. He looked shattered in his gray beret.”