Ticker-Tape

By Rishi Dastidar

From politics to pop, from the UK to California, wherever digital heartbeats flutter and stutter, Ticker-tape is a maximalist take on 21st century living. Rishi Dastidar's first full collection showcases one of contemporary poetry's most distinctive voices, delivering effervescence with equal servings of panache and whiplash-quick wit.
Here is sheer madcap ingenuity and also impressive breadth; ranging from odes of love to deconstructed diversity campaigns and detonations of banter's worst excesses, plus appearances from ex-SugaBabes, a shark who comes to tea, to the matters of matchstick empires and national identity. Ticker-tape is bold, adventuresome and wry – an unmissable and irrepressible debut.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911027324

Rishi Dastidar

Rishi Dastidar’s poetry has been published by the Financial Times and BBC amongst many others. He is a fellow of The Complete Works, and a consulting editor at The Rialto magazine. A poem from his debut collection Ticker-tape was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2018, and his second collection, Saffron Jack, was published in the UK by Nine Arches Press in 2020. He is also editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair).

Book preview

cover.jpg

Ticker-tape

img1.jpg

Ticker-tape

Rishi Dastidar

ISBN: 978-1911027171

Copyright © Rishi Dastidar, 2017

Cover artwork © Ria Dastidar, Uberpup

Website: uberpup.net

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Rishi Dastidar has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published March 2017 by:

Nine Arches Press

PO Box 6269

Rugby

CV21 9NL

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in Britain by:

The Russell Press Ltd.

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

img2.pngimg3.jpg

Contents

The summers of Camus’ youth

The Girl Boy Black White Urban Desert Digital Blues Rhinestone Drone Desire

Trunk shavasana (a/k/a the bliss of incantation makes it good to be alive)

Deconstructing an attempted date with Miss Pacific Standard Time

A shark comes to dinner

Contour

From Stavanger

Doom loop

THE PACIFIC OCEAN IS BECOMING CAFFEINATED

Matchstick Empire

22 March, Working in an Office on Berners Street

Licking stamps

Joystick Valhalla

We are Premier League

Bantz

Rave equations

On enthusiasm

Making a cheese soufflé rise

The anniversary issue

Writ

All the laurels in the world, and you give me these?

Sister of the sun

Towards a singularity

Ticker-tape

Redzone

Cheerleader

Arguing with Mondrian about space

Secrets need confidence and force

The last neon sign maker in Hong Kong

Code: pink and red and blue

Gunmetal

The valley of the infinite

Pretanic: (A journal of some proceedings on the North Atlantic archipelago)

The British genius

#MyEngland

What’s the matter with [insert (non-metropolitan) English constituency of choice]?

Diagnosis: ‘Londonism’

Strategies to save the Union

Tom Paine’s submarine

The problem of becoming English

Point of departure

A man is on the TV, telling me about

Risk patterns

Diversity campaign

The campaign for mapping generic terms for streams in the contiguous United States

Methuselah and the Link-Girl

These things boys do

What night is

Theseus’ ship

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author & this book

Parades go by /

So many beautiful parades go by /

Leave me behind

– The Magnetic Fields

The summers of Camus’ youth

In Algiers, you don’t talk about ‘going swimming’

but ‘knocking off for a swim’.

I won’t insist.

People swim in the harbour

and then go rest on the buoys.

When you pass a buoy

where a pretty girl is sitting,

you shout to your friends,

I tell you it’s a seagull.

These are healthy pleasures.

They certainly seem ideal to the young men.

The Girl Boy Black White Urban Desert Digital Blues Rhinestone Drone Desire

This is the first | the first in a series of agreeable gestures |

The delta is an open microphone | eleven strings tie us to you |

We will make