‘The Profane is a note from the underground, a message being sent from an island on fire, an email shot off at three in the morning. This is to say that Sarna’s book is one of vulnerability, loneliness, joy, humour, hope and grief. It’s a human book which tells us it’s okay to be human.’ – Matthew Dickman ‘Sarna has something rich and meaningful to communicate, and the lyric sensibility, love of language, beat and rhyme, and inventive zest to bring alive on the page all the vividness and pleasure and plangency of life. This is a book to savour and treasure for all the years it will stand on your shelf.’ – Chandrahas Choudhury A witches’ brew of art, politics, religion and mythology, The Profane is rich with music and images. Here are poems of heartbreak and disillusion, of loneliness and mortality, but also of passion for life on earth, in all its mud and glory. In the pages of this collection, Kurt Cobain, Napoleon and Amir Khusro meet, and Homeric tough guys get what they deserve. Satyajit Sarna’s vision embraces our broken world and salutes the one chance we get to experience it.