Carrier Wave, Jaswinder Bolina
Winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry
selected by Lyn Hejinian
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"This, Jaswinder Bolina’s first major volume of poetry, is a brilliant invention. With a delight that in no way denies the desperateness of the palimpsested circumstances in which the world is embedded, Bolina bears witness to ‘the crooning / of our life and times. // The compacted units / The impenetrable whole.’ In that last phrase, of course, we hear an echo from George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, where he speaks of ‘the pure joy / Of the mineral fact // Tho it is impenetrable.’ But if he has Oppen’s sense of the unfathomable nature of what exists, he also displays in his work a polycultural erudition that bears comparison with that of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Jaswinder Bolina is a bard, and his Carrier Wave is a magisterial achievement."
—Lyn Hejinian, author of The Fatalist, The Beginner, and My Life

"The super agency of Carrier Wave makes a slap-stick of language’s tendency toward opacity as well as a revelation of its tendency to be transparent. And somehow, thankfully, Jaswinder Bolina has given us a—gasp—fun book. It sparks."
—Dean Young, author of Elegy on Toy Piano, Design with X, and Strike Anywhere


Jaswinder Bolina was born in Chicago in 1978. He received his B.A. from Loyola University Chicago and his M.F.A. from the University of Michigan. He currently studies and teaches in Athens, Ohio, where he is a Ph.D. student in the Creative Writing Program at Ohio University. His work has previously appeared in Ploughshares and the Laurel Review.

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