Mattress Makers

Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize, Best Overall Book of Poetry, 2023

Persaud's new collection celebrates the music in the seemingly mundane. Imbued with a deeply philosophical consciousness, and the questioning spirit of the ancients, it engages in the pleasures of technology, while ever cognizant of its drawbacks in its assault on the personal. As always, with this poet, there is an Upanishadic, yogic, and quantum search for truth and the essence of reality--the ancient Indian concepts of multiplicity, multipresence, and simultaneous existences finding support in cutting-edge quantum physics. The poems therefore flip on themselves, move in a blink from place to place, from time to time, from existence to existence. They delve into ancestries and the movement and intertwining of peoples, cultures, plants, animals, cuisines, languages, loves and the passing of eras. Love and the exuberance in the world around--centered in the Florida land-(and sea-) scape--permeates this work.