Praise and Poems

eds’; ‘You don’t need a name in order to be dead’.

Kona’s vision is of a classless world, ‘an order where no one goes/ to bed on an empty stomach’; a dialectic built on compassion. He has confabulated a highly distinctive cosmic outlook from a cross-fertilization of influences: Marxism, Hermetics, the all-inclusive Varnashrama dharma of Sri Ramakrishna and Gandhi, as well as Saint Francis of Assisi and the ‘Thomist’ ideas drawn from the theology of Aquinas. Kona’s parabolic poetry constitutes something beyond what its author calls ‘the possibility of “Prakash Kona”’: Conjurer of nights marks Kona’s illuminative arrival.

Subaltern

Cut my body to pieces and kill my only child,
I’ll not stop believing that this order
Thrives on murder and prostitution.
The glass houses of the bourgeoisie are
stained;
Stones cannot break them.
There is a sad and silent way I walk evening
after evening,
The smell of death is among the
abandoned poor
Enclosed in lightless spaces of the city.
Their beauty is that of stars on milky white
nights;
Resilience gives them fiery exuberance
They are endowed with power to look back;
They seem dead to glossy eyes of
bourgeoisie.
They live not in spite of themselves
But because they know
They are owners of streets on the move,
They are owners of history,
Their tales will be told for all times to come.

on Streets that Smell of Dying Roses

…the book that many younger authors have
tried to write and failed — one that disassembles language, narrative and structure, throwing them all into a molten semantic stream. Understanding, falling into, and melding with the flow of this stream one of the more enjoyable literary experiences I’ve had in recent years. A comparison to Joyce’s Ulysses seems apt…. On the strength of this work, Prakash Kona seems poised for greatness.

Charles Allen Wyman
The Absinthe Literary Review

…an experimental work of the highest order

Mad Hatter’s Review