Glitchwork

£16.99

by Mantra Mukim

Glitchwork tracks the uneven lineages of Central India, building on modernist legacies and reckoning with the spectres of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Mantra Mukim’s debut poetry collection is situated in a timeless, forested grid, poised on the verge of industrial erasure. This grid, a restless site of extraction and production, also brims with potential for lushness, fey ambience, and petite clearings.

Its three long poems consist of fragments on a mysterious Cold War ‘plant’, remixes of Surdas (the medieval-Braj poet), notes on palaeolithic hands, philology of the line, anomalies in a lunar-roving vehicle, and the origin myths of Raipur.

by Mantra Mukim

Glitchwork tracks the uneven lineages of Central India, building on modernist legacies and reckoning with the spectres of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Mantra Mukim’s debut poetry collection is situated in a timeless, forested grid, poised on the verge of industrial erasure. This grid, a restless site of extraction and production, also brims with potential for lushness, fey ambience, and petite clearings.

Its three long poems consist of fragments on a mysterious Cold War ‘plant’, remixes of Surdas (the medieval-Braj poet), notes on palaeolithic hands, philology of the line, anomalies in a lunar-roving vehicle, and the origin myths of Raipur.

ISBN: 9781068488023
101 pages
Date published: 16/04/2026
Royal paperback

For fans of: Vidyan Ravinthiran, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Mona Arshi

Praise:

‘I'm truly amazed by Mantra Mukim's Glitchwork. It seems to alchemise the many forms of twenty-first century lyric writing — prose, erasure, documentary, remix and more — in brilliant illustration of its own statement: 'Long poem spreads the message of breakdown in the four known directions'. Endlessly quotable, it is one of the essential long poems of this decade.’ —Jeremy Noel-Tod

‘Glitchwork remains endemic with haunting, with magical apostrophe, that weaves itself, with an intrinsic temperature that seems to dis-incline itself, powerfully in-scripting itself by means of seeming poetic ejecta baring insight by living lingual minimum.’ —Will Alexander

‘Mantra Mukim’s Glitchwork is an astounding work that defies any conventional enclosures in terms of form, thought, narration, and time. Mukim notes that “the angel knows that it was invented not for deliverance but apparitions.” Glitchwork was invented to excavate apparitions of history and language, and perhaps poetry itself. The visions it offers us are “something rare, holy, or supernatural in tangible form”—a form of line travel within ever shifting, powerful “darshan, the hegemony of the seen.” —Don Mee Choi

Bio:

Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist from Raipur, India, currently based in Oxford. His work has appeared in Minor Literature, SpamZine, Datableed, Poetry Review, Hotel, and Rialto among other places. His Hindi poems have been featured in समावर्तन (Samavartan), and anthologised in युवा द्वादश (Twelve Young Poets). He co-edits Almost Island.