Yr Skull a Cathedral

Param Anand Singh

This striking cover will grab eyes thanks to Param’s fearless decision to remove all text from the front, challenging the whole thing book covers are usually meant to do. Param says, “The book cover isn’t the point-of-sale marketing tool it used to be, with most small press poetry sales occurring online (where the title is repeated next to the cover image) or at readings. Plus, Allison Cole’s art is more interesting than my name. Plus, we can do whatever we want because there are no rules.” Not including the title takes the cover from the marketing department and focuses the artwork more squarely on its interaction with the content of the poems. I hope our distributor doesn’t mind. (They probably will.)

“In Yr Skull A Cathedral, Param Anand Singh helps me unlearn what a poem is, what translation is, what punctuation is for, why capital letters, why songs. These ecstatic pieces show me how to be irreverent yet full of awe and humility. Read this book for its uncontainable interruptions, its compulsive speed and its careful ear. Here, language is useful in all kinds of ways, as ritual, music, or as a way to completely destroy everything, but with serious love.” —Madeline ffitch, author of Valparaiso, Round the Horn

“Yr Skull a Cathedral is an enigmatic man at the train station who enters into your personal space and shares with you a highly personal and outrageous story from his life that challenges your beliefs.  As you sit on the hard, wooden bench and begin processing every beautiful image, arousing detail, and imaginative expression of what he just shared with you, he jumps up and disappears into a departing train. That is when you find yourself screaming out, ‘Thank you!'” —Eric Paul (Arab on Radar), author of I Offered Myself As The Sea

“What’s in a skull (hallow’d, hollow’d), that darkly bright ellipsis, cathedral of cathedrals, engine of engines, wilderness of wildernesses? Param Anand Singh knows and sings in and of this sacred resonant space-within-space through translations and transcriptions of language and light, devotional mutations of form and memory.This book (skull-like, a book of books, borderless, unlocatable) is living transmission, reciprocal and illuminated. Copy it by trembling hand.” —Jeremy Hoevenaar, author of Insolvency, Insolvency!

See Also, Lilith but Dark