Time Regime: Poems, Jhani Randhawa

Description

Time Regime: Poems
Paperback – March 27, 2022
by Jhani Randhawa (Author)

Winner of the 2021 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, Time Regime is a dazzling, genre-defiant debut that fractures and reimagines the boundaries of self, body, ecology, and history. Described as “spectrally luminous,” Jhani Randhawa’s collection moves through experiments, dream logs, field notes, and epistolary meditations to construct a mutating poetic body—one intent on interrupting the violent rhythms and expectations of neoliberal imperialism.

Through the intersecting frameworks of ecofeminism and necrosociality, Randhawa disassembles and reassembles the marginalized body, refusing the regimes of purity, discipline, and erasure that have long governed which lives are legible. The poems traverse temporal and material dimensions, engaging queer phenomenology, spiritual and ecological precarity, postindustrial longing, ritual, and the volatile relationships between bodies and the systems that seek to contain them.

Time Regime follows multiple beings—rice germ, machine intelligence, parasites, limestone deposits, a grandmother’s skin cells, the poet, no-self, even the mythic winged cow Surabhi—as they collide, drift, and recombine across domestic ruin, ecological collapse, and the spectral edges of empire. Randhawa’s lyric world is one in which presence flickers, dissolves, and reforms, offering an alternative figuration of the postmodern self: porous, resistant, and in constant communion with mess.

In this transcendent and uncompromising debut, Randhawa crafts a poetic fugue that bears witness to living under the pressure of state-sanctioned death while insisting on the radical possibility of transformation. Time Regime is a profound reorientation—toward survival, toward multiplicity, and toward the bodies that refuse disappearance.