There Are Tears in Things: Selected Poems and Prose by Laksmi Pamuntjak
(2001 – 2016)

This volume contains Laksmi’s collected writings between 2001 and 2016, including poems from Ellipsis and The Anagram, short fictions from Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art, the prologue to The Birdwoman’s Palate and poems such as “The Traveler’s Tale”, “October” and “Bhisma’s Final Day” that have been published independently in various poetry journals.

In this voyage of it is not only the mythic presence that is writ large—from the Mahabharata to the Iliad--but also art, music, and the political. Her searing reinterpretation of the works of Max Beckmann, Edvard Munch, and Egon Schiele, as well as her profound reflections on the brutal legacy of the mass massacres of anti-Communists in sixties Indonesia show the restless mind of the perpetual wanderer: a being translated by movement, both at sea and at home everywhere.

It also returns us, always, to love—to the fact that there are tears in things. Sunt lachrimae rerum. As the poet Viki Holmes says of this tender and rigorous volume, “To understand life—to understand love—is to understand sorrow, to move forward, with resilience and curiosity.”