TOMORROW SOMEONE WILL ARREST YOU
(Political Poetry 2010-2023)
All discipline
a deception to hide the wildness, all symmetry
an excuse for keeping count.
Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You cements Meena Kandasamy as one of the most exciting, radical thinkers at work today. These poems chronicle wanting, art-making, and the practising of resistance and solidarity in the face of a hostile state. Here, the personal is political, and Kandasamy moves between sex, desire, family and wider societal issues of caste, the refugee crisis, and freedom of expression with grace and defiance. This is a bold, unforgettable collection by a poet who compels us to sit up and listen.
Published by Atlantic Books, UK & Juggernaut Books, India.
This impassioned, compelling collection moves between rhythmically rich evocations of friendship, motherhood, love and sex. and urgent political topics: caste prejudice, freedom of expression, racism and the oppression of women and LGBTQ+ people. In the title poem, addressing the arrests of two human-rights activists in India in 2015, we see the violence of the corrupt state revealed: "Tomorrow someone will arrest you. The day after that, you / will be considered a 'terrorist' for life ... Long Live Silence." Kandasamy's writing is fierce and direct in its criticism of this deadening, suffocating silence, and those in power who perpetuate it. These vital, beautiful poems burn with a radically illuminating rage.
Rebecca Tamás, Guardian
Meena Kandasamy's lines of poetry cascade in an unstoppable poetic-surging into a rallying cry that denounces the injustices of caste and gender and right-wing state terror to reinvigorate those who "struggle & think & love together with THE POET".
Poetry Book Society
Over and again, she leaps and lands. In Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You, Meena Kandasamy vaults from blunt complaint to lyric evocation to caustic quip. With a cerebral poise reminiscent of Paul Celan, she navigates a torrent of shapeshifting images . . . The succinct clarity of Kandasamy’s poems, free from prevarication and dissemblance, is invigorating.
Sylvee Gore, Poetry Foundation
Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You is an extraordinary exploration into a deep vulnerability and truth; Meena Kandasamy is an incredibly beautiful poet, prophetic, powerful and empowering.
Salena Godden, author of MRS DEATH MISSES DEATH
AUDIOBOOK
For the first time, I had the lovely opportunity to narrate my own book for publication. So, Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You is now published as an audiobook by W.F. Howes on 1 Feb 2024.
Duration: 1 hour 37 minutes
Available on Audible, GooglePlay, and wherever else you download your audiobooks.