This, Jaswinder Bolina’s first major volume of poetry, is a brilliant invention. With a delight that in no way denies the desperateness of the palimpsested circumstances in which the world is embedded, Bolina bears witness to “the crooning / of our life and times. // The compacted units / The impenetrable whole.” In that last phrase, of course, we hear an echo from George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, where he speaks of “the pure joy / Of the mineral fact // Tho it is impenetrable.” But if he has Oppen’s sense of the unfathomable nature of what exists, he also displays in his work a polycultural erudition that bears comparison with that of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Jaswinder Bolina is a bard, and his Carrier Wave is a magisterial achievement.
“The super agency of Carrier Wave makes a slap-stick of language’s tendency toward opacity as well as a revelation of its tendency to be transparent. And somehow, thankfully, Jaswinder Bolina has given us a—gasp—fun book. It sparks.”
