About
Sasenarine Persaud is a Florida-based essayist, novelist, poet and short story writer, who originated the term Yogic Realism to describe his aesthetics. He is the author of 14 books of prose and poetry. His work and Yogic Realism has been the focus of a doctoral dissertation. Canadian Literature calls him “one of those rare poets who gets the recipe of humanness exactly right” and The Halifax Chronicle Herald “dauntlessly brainy…a bit like reading T.S. Eliot mixed up with Rabindranath Tagore…. Persaud’s poems are unapologetically learned.”
His awards include: The KM Hunter Foundation Award (Toronto), the Leslie Epstein Fellowship at Boston University and the 2018 Dharmic Arts and Humanities Award from HAF (Hindu American Foundation).
On his fiction, The Globe and Mail writes, “Persaud’s breathtaking narrative….nimbly pits self-ironizing postmodernism against the timeless values of narrative.”
Mattress Makers (2023) is his most recent book. He is also the author of Monsoon on the Fingers of God (2018); Love in a Time of Technology (2014); Lantana Strangling Ixora (2011); In a Boston Night (2008); The Wintering Kundalini (2002); Canada Geese and Apple Chatney (1998) and A Surf of Sparrows' Songs (1996); the novels Dear Death (1990) and The Ghost of Bellow's Man (1992) and several essays published in the US, Canada, the UK, India and the UAE.
Anthologies in which Persaud's work has been published include: A World of Poetry (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2017); Give the Ball to the Poet: A New Anthology of Caribbean Poetry (Commonwealth Education Trust, London, 2014); Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today (TSAR, Toronto, 2012); The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket (Peepal Tree, Leeds, 2012); A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories (Marshall-Cavendish, Singapore, 2010); Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English (Broadview, Peterborough, 2009); Anthology of Colonial and Post Colonial Short Fiction (Houghton Mifflin, Boston & New York, 2007); The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005); The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (2000); and The Journey Prize Anthology: short fiction from the best of Canada’s new writers (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1997).
His work has been published in eight countries, spanning four continents and is used in colleges and universities in Canada, England, Guyana, India, the Caribbean, Mauritius, and the United States. Persaud was born in Guyana (South America) and has lived in Toronto for several years. He is presently based in Florida.
Featured Work
Mattress Makers
This new collection celebrates the music in the seemingly mundane. Imbued with a deeply philosophical consciousness, and the questioning spirit of the ancients, it engages in the pleasures of technology, while ever cognizant of its drawbacks in its assault on the personal. As always, with this poet, there is an Upanishadic, yogic, and quantum search for truth and the essence of reality—the ancient Indian concepts of multiplicity, multipresence, and simultaneous existences finding support in cutting- edge quantum physics. The poems therefore flip on themselves, move in a blink from place to place, from time to time, from existence to existence. They delve into ancestries and the movement and intertwining of peoples and cultures. loves and the passing of eras. Love and the exuberance in the world around—centered in the Florida land-(and sea-) scape—permeates this work.
Other Works
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Mattress Makers
2023
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Monsoon on the Fingers of God
2018
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Monsoon on the Fingers of God
2018
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Love in a Time of Technology
2014
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Lantana Strangling Ixora
2011
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Unclosed Entrances: Selected Poems
2011
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In a Boston Night
2008
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A Writer Like You
2002
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The Wintering Kundalini
2002
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The Hungry Sailor
2000
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Canada Geese and Apple Chatney
1998
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A Surf of Sparrows' Songs
1996
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The Ghost of Bellow's Man
1992
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Dear Death
1989
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Demerary Telepathy
1989
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Between the Dash and the Comma
1989
Awards and Recognition
- 2018 Dharmic Arts and Humanities Award (HAF)