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Pervin Saket

A Theory of Knots

A Theory of Knots

₹499.00
₹499.00
| $21 |£15.99
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Forthcoming in November 2026

These lyric, unsparing poems stitch together a story of identity, belonging, and dissolution.

There is a peculiar satisfaction in untying a knot. You tug at one end, your fingers reading the loops and entanglements, until the hold is finally released, like an exhale. Most knots, however, remain in disguise, as absolutes, as inheritances. We call them tradition, borders, religion, marriage, law, and yes, even language. The poems in A Theory of Knots begin here, with the suspicion that what ties us together is also what keeps us apart.

The five sections in this volume pull at myth and memory, home and skin, DNA and desire, asking what connects us—and at what cost.

By turns and returns, Pervin Saket’s poems linger over our constructs, examining why they’ve come to feel so inevitable. When does a name become a story? How does a story become a certainty? Where does certainty become a knot? 

Advance praise for A Theory of Knots:

A Theory of Knots is a deeply sensual, embodied collection that explores language, loss, and the process of opening to poetry in the rhythms of the ordinary.
—Ellen Bass, former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, author of Indigo

*

These philosophical poems thread curiosity that is both wry and factual through the heart of the matter. A beautiful collection of complexities.
—Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Poet Laureate of Vancouver, author of sometimes, forest

*

With a manifest empathy for people, places and objects in transition—sometimes camouflaged by wit and irony—Pervin Saket traces subtle connections between everydayness and the sublime . . . The sacred is never far from the worldly surface of these elegantly turned poems.
—Ranjit Hoskote, poet, translator, art critic and cultural theorist

*

In delightfully embodied and numinous diction, A Theory of Knots turns the everyday into a series of puzzles that are a pleasure to observe and parse. The variations in poetic form urge compassionate imaginings of very real lives rendered with dignity, whimsy and palpable affection. A terrific, engaging book where even the most gridlocked scenes of urban life are made softer, more luminous.
—Divya Victor, author of Curb, winner of the 2022 PEN America Poetry Award and 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

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