Glitchwork

Poetry shaped by global modernism, personal inquiry and the long shadow of environmental disaster in India.

Glitchwork, a debut poetry collection, traces a jagged lineage of Central India through a densely forested grid, blending industrial sublimity, Cold War relics, Surdas remixes, palaeolithic echoes, and post-independence modernism.

Glitchwork tracks the uneven lineages of Central India, building on modernist legacies and reckoning with the spectres of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Mantra Mukim’s debut poetry collection is situated in a timeless, forested grid, poised on the verge of industrial erasure. This grid, a restless site of extraction and production, also brims with potential for lushness, fey ambience, and petite clearings.

Its three long poems consist of fragments on a mysterious Cold War ‘plant’, remixes of Surdas (the medieval-Braj poet), notes on palaeolithic hands, philology of the line, anomalies in a lunar-roving vehicle, and the origin myths of Raipur.