"Ranjani Murali's is a fast- moving eye, missing nothing, sparing nothing. Every detail of the seen world is here, which is at once both the absurdity and the dis-ease of our represented and re-represented lives, troubled by the position of privilege in which we all 'reek of watching.' With a mind 'suspended // between seeing and being seen' the poet guides us through a kind of underworld, urgently crisscrossing the hyper-real of cinema and self-deception in a global theater in which any one of us might 'step out into the raw / brick temple, rain-shorn, and bow in reverence / to an abscess adorned with flower;' where 'the hero is smoking in / the trailer-toilet, his window overlooking a river where / a buffalo is courting storm-water;' and the Supreme-Mother-Goddess is 'a myth so real that / it makes you pause at every corner and turn furtively back, // wondering if she is tailing you.' Under Murali's cool urbanity, her unshakable irony and equanimity, runs a line of anger that feels exactly like a line of clarity."—Susan Tichy