Time Regime: Poems

TIME REGIME: POEMS
by Jhani Randhawa
978-0-9994514-7-2
$16.00 / Paperback / 6" x 9" / 144 pages
Gaudy Boy, April 1, 2022
N. America: Bookshop / Amazon
S.E. Asia: In the best bookstores
UK: Good Press (Glasgow)
Distributed by Ingram

Winner of the 2021 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize
Finalist, California Book Awards
Gold Medal, California Book Awards

True to the interdisciplinary spirit of the poetry collection, this collaboration of moving image, sound, and text features reading by Jhani Randhawa, an animation by illustrator Somnath Bhatt, and an original soundscape by cellist and composer Thea Mesirow.

About

A collection of experiments, mechanical dream logs, epistolaries, and field notes, Time Regime (April 2022, Gaudy Boy) — winner of the 2021 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize — 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. 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.

Jhani Randhawa is a Kenyan-Punjabi/Anglo-American multidisciplinary artist and independent scholar. They received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and live between the U.S. and the U.K. With Teo Rivera-Dundas, Jhani is a co-founding editor of rivulet, an experimental journal dedicated to investigations of the interstitial.

Praise

“Time Regime is an impressively realized work of poetry, with the maturity and assurance that are more typical of second or third books. While its lines are clearly marked by, and in conversation with, the poems of other minority experimental poets in both this country and the U.K. (Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Will Alexander, Nisha Ramayya, among others), Randhawa’s poetry is also completely its own.”
—Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry

“This book is a rare page-turner that demands radical inclusivity from the breath of a brilliant writer. These pages wrangle with the divergent tools to awaken everyone who dares to be part of the poet’s experiment.”
—CAConrad, poet, AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration

“Randhawa’s stunning first book invites us to journey with them through a multitude of worlds—present, historical, personal—and immerse ourselves in the complexities of language and what it means to be alive.”
—Wendy Chen, poet, Unearthings

“Time Regime moves, gently, recklessly, always with great care, through water, wound, earth, archive, vision.”
—Mallika Singh, author of Retrieval

“Composed with the diligence and precision of a cartographer and sharply meditative and instigative, Time Regime asks you to listen to the iteration of earth we inhabit, the little earths within us, and the possibilities of earth beyond our corporality... A kaleidoscopic collection charting how we die many deaths as quiet and loud and beautiful and painful as a boulder being born through erosion.”
—Jenifer Sang Eun Park, poet, Autobiography of Horse

“Time Regime is a careful attending and attunement to the residue of our heartbreaking world and intimate entanglements with the other wrecked bodies (human and otherwise) ‘caught in its gullet.’”
—Ching-In Chen, poet, recombinant

“[With] Randhawa’s visionary, encyclopedic attention, part laboratory, part love letter, part auto-ecology, Time Regime is poetry as the process—and the art—of critical and selfless world-restoration.”
—Brandon Shimoda, author

“The language of Jhani Randhawa takes down the toxic tendrils of time as it makes space for wild emergent conversations and landscapes. It is a feat, a feast, a fight.”
—Sawako Nakayasu, poet

"Time Regime begins with a sense of movement that mimics that of a river, but by the collection’s last poems, this movement is vertical, mountainous. . . . Randhawa’s poetry excavates a poetic language already within us, a language that rearranges the familiar and situates us just slightly apart from where we first began." 
—Manahil Bandukwala, Plenitude Magazine