Simple Fantasies

Filled with nostalgia for love and moments imbued by it, Simple Fantasies gives one a look into the daydreaming world of the immigrant mind. Immigrants due to transnational adjustments are hardly celebrated in the realm of love poems in a neoliberal America; however, Simple Fantasies breaks out of that status quo and embraces an international, multicultural lens into the realism of love. Quite indulgent at times, these poems can speak for the loss of our loved ones, not through death, but through the end of a loving moment or the end of a space-and-time continuum that holds us together.

About the Author :
Sujash Purna is a Bangladeshi poet and photographer based in Madison, Wisconsin. A first-year PhD fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is the author of Biriyani (Poet's Haven), Azans for the Infidel (Mouthfeel Press), and Epidemic of Nostalgia (Finishing Line Press). His poetry has appeared in California State Poetry Quarterly, Reed Magazine, South Carolina Review, Hawai`i Pacific Review, Kansas City Voices, Poetry Salzburg Review, Gutter, Stonecoast Review, and others. A 2022 Anaphora Residency Fellow and Moon City Review Creative Nonfiction Award Winner, Sujash is the poetry editor for Pyre Magazine. Sujash and his photography can be found on Instagram @poeticnomadic

Review :
For a young poet like Sujash Purna, it might seem surprising that all but a few of the twenty poems in his Simple Fantasies, concern themselves with time and its passing. This clear obsession (from a poet who has already given to the world a book titled Epidemic of Nostalgia) continues to produce lyrically poignant work with consistently arresting and sometimes surreal imagery and a sense of loss belying each captured moment's present. For though we are "bound by time" ("An Urn on a Bookshelf,") time itself "runs away like rustling /leaves brushing gently/against our bare feet" ("Holding on to"). The only respite offered comes in the title poem in which love, at least for a time, allows the poet to be "no more haunted" the years "departure doesn't scare me, / with you beside me, we can cup our hands, catch watercolor raindrops." Of course the title of that poem is "Simple Fantasies," but perhaps in that poem and it title, Purna suggests the power of both imagination and love to suspend, in a beautifully rendered moment, the dictates of time.-Joe Benevento, author of The Cracker Box Poems One thing that separates the poet Sujash Purna from many of his contemporaries is his sharp wit, sense of humor, and considerable skill for unlayering conscious versions of the self as a measure of social performance in which the speaker fails to settle his conflicted heart. In Simple Fantasies what might at first appear to be persona translates more accurately to a Jungian sense of anima, a deeper hidden self. Here is a consummate magician who often takes as his strategy a series of comic missteps, which shift a poem's central consideration from the earthly realm to the metaphysical.-Marcus Cafagña, author of All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season One part of the fantasy of Sujash Purna's Simple Fantasies is to be released from what haunts us-"I almost forced you to return to my memory / as if on a Ouija board". We are haunted by our own stories, as we are haunted by what others have felt safe enough to share with us, but from which we may never recover ("I remember moments and lapses, and ghosts buzzing / like bees on a honeycomb of gilded space and time"). But the other part, woven throughout this collection, is love. The people and places, the smells and tastes we love today are not destined to be tomorrow's ghosts-we are the caretakers of these memories and hold them forever in our bodies.-Sara Burge, author of Apocalypse Ranch