These Errors Are Correct

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A meditation on grief, These Errors are Correct is Jeet Thayil’s most intimate work to date. In poems of tenderness and rage, time blurs into a continuous present visited by Billy the Kid, the Buddha, Lata Mangeshkar, Jesus and Beethoven, by unnamed protagonists for whom faith and addiction are interchangeable, and by a remote god-like figure who will ‘lick / your wound with his infected tongue’. A range of fixed and invented forms–rhymed syllabics, terza rima, ghazals, sonnets, the sestina, the canzone, stealth rhymes–make for a virtuosic, haunting collection. Originally published in 2008, the book has been out of print since 2010. With illustrations by the author, this new edition returns to the reader an essential and timeless book of poems. These Errors are Correct won the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award.

A collaboration between Jeet Thayil and The Burning Deck, the track on the back flap appears as ‘Aquatic’ in These Errors are Correct, and as ‘The River Under the River’ on The Burning Deck album Where My Leaves Come to Rest. You can find the music of The Burning Deck on Bandcamp/Soundcloud & Spotify.