Tiny Extravaganzas - by Diane Mehta (Paperback)

About the Book

Tiny Extravaganzas, Diane Mehta's fiercely lyrical book of poems, works the American sentence to its limits, moving against and within tradition.

Book Synopsis

Tiny Extravaganzas, Diane Mehta's fiercely lyrical new collection, works the American sentence to its limits. Mehta's poems are miniaturist examinations of art, aging, literature, grief, parenting, the sublime, labor, and faith. She chases rhythm, rhymes with wit, and upends formal verse with phrasing that moves like jazz against and within tradition. Art is both anchor and a framework for understanding the world, and each poem is an opportunity to have a conversation with the reader and with art and other artists. Her poems vary from small, contemplative musical interludes to epic poems about collective suffering. Mehta's refined and propulsive poems come with an emotional bang that quietly breaks your heart.

Review Quotes

"Dynamic diction is the pulsing heart of Mehta's excellent second book. Eschewing traditional narrative structures, she opts to create soundscapes that reflect and reinterpret events through a fragmented syntax: 'Flingabout night swung in with dead leaves and young bats/ screeching. Acrobatic papers, phonemes scatting.' Mehta's approach to rhythm and rhyme upends traditional verse forms with phrasing that moves like jazz, both against and within established poetic traditions." Starred review in Publishers Weekly

"In meditations on 'fortunate times / and quicksand feelings, ' Mehta, a poet in New York City, induces a staccato rhythm of poetic effusion, darting from insight to insight, with the graceful and erratic comportment of one 'wandering by accident or design / a way to find your tongue.' She probes the 'curve and scaw of personality' through lively stylistic devices...'" David Woo, LitHub

"Language that shimmers and reinvents, words that challenge and direct the reader's attention, lush settings and private musings-these are all foundational components in Diane Mehta's work, Tiny Extravaganzas. One must finally argue: they are not tiny, they are the world made tangible, cracked open, reimagined, dusted and shined for us to experience as well." Carlene Guadapee, MicroLit

"Diane Mehta's ekphrastic poems dilate and amplify and burn, enact that Yeatsian notion that '[a]rt is love modeled in experience / fired at higher temperatures than experience.' These poems give us a speaker whose unruly feelings are wildly metered, and 'who refuses to cohere in an abstract field.' She takes in the whole 'bee-vibrating' world through the senses."

-Diane Seuss

author of frank: sonnets

"These are lavish, lush poems about the power of art. Diane Mehta's attention to the music that lives in words and the metaphorical possibilities that inhabit images is astonishing. A building 'leans into its shade of angles' and a flower is 'burdened by its scent, its silhouette all season / petaling and unpetaling.' Her erudite and complex mind steps always to the side, to observe, to think. 'My clocks tick-tock with caveats, ' Mehta tells us. 'No peace of mind.'"

-Kevin Prufer

author of Fear