This is What Happened, by Salman Akhtar

Tautly stretched over the chasm between idolization and iconoclasm, restraint and audacity, and the man-animal distinction, the poems contained in this book evoke scintillating images and garden-fresh metaphors.

Parrots that live on Mount Everest, tigers who swallow poets, fishless oceans, ill-tempered camels, and sparrows of memory coexist in its pages with pancakes of platitudes, the Great Mountain of Fear, a starved Bedouin who feels enormous guilt for being hungry, the change in the direction of toes with age, and the one-eyed blacksmith of time. Never has magical surrealism cloaked existential truths better in poetry.