Released April 30th, 2024 // 978-1-916938-11-3 // 142 pages // RRP £11.99
furnish, entrap is a collection of poems built from the inside-out, in a way that can only come from a deep engagement with history and with the materiality of the text, the word, the line, that is both intellectual and visceral. Kashif Sharma-Patel uses the socio-political forces of this country to express the experience of those to whom it has been hostile for over half a century. Sharma-Patel has created a collection which challenges the reader to recognise what they may have previously assumed about Britain and our colonial legacy, and at the same time, the beauty of these poems lies in their lyrical inventiveness, in the way they open up new ways of thinking about culture, through the act of poetic thinking.
PRAISE for furnish, entrap:
Kashif Sharma-Patel walks us through their urban worlds of cr0 and LDN, centres of the multiculture imbued with critical study. Come, listen closely—feel the sonorous vibrations of the impeccable and focused linguistics served up in their debut. Sharma-Patel flexes contemporary disaffection and alienation with intellectual prowess, backed by rich strategies of wordplay and dialectics, their sensibilities attuned to texture and taste in phenomena, aesthetics and meaning-making. Mythopoiesis here wraps us taut like a coarse silk, a detail that embellishes the moment and memory of play—although play here is the desire for play and desire’s own play, contrastingly across thought and embodiment. A gender-queerness emerges familiar and fresh nonetheless into the open field of the page. Even while fielding, the match itself is a vehicle for play—fifty overs soundtracked by wafting sub-bass and close rhythms, accompanied by the scent of grill.
— Nat Raha, author of of sirens, bodies and faultlines
Kashif Sharma-Patel is tuned to gentle frequencies and the rough notation of our most exacting music. Hey, this book says, your lyric is showing, sprawling like the city and spilling like a street. It’s new like the day is awake all night.
— Luke Roberts, author of Home Radio
Sharma-Patel’s use of the tongue is a feat in itself within the pages of furnish, entrap. furnish, entrap makes lightwork of using language to stretch across space, concepts and emotions. These poems unfurl right before your eyes to unleash a battering of poetic verse of “(para)literary exegeses”. The political-poetics of furnish, entrap have consequences and are a call to action once you have read them.
— Jasmine Gibson, author of A Beauty Has Come
An electric collection of poetry, furnish, entrap by Kashif Sharma-Patel excels in its political dissection of contemporary society, but also in its observation of the human condition and what it means to exist in a world that stretches us thin. Ricocheting between questions of sexuality, gender, diaspora, cultural inheritance, colonisation, queerness, the west, the east, and the socio- economic, it is impossible to escape the sheer turbulence jammed into every stanza. But the brilliance here comes from allowing these themes to inhabit the words, to live and breathe within its structures. In doing so, Sharma-Patel has sculpted a poetics of original beauty that inhabits with such eloquence the mind and vision of the reader. One cannot help but see things previously unable to be seen, to hold them, and in this conclusion absorb the power of this book and be forever changed by it”
— Stuart McPherson, author of End Ceremonies
ABOUT Kashif Sharma-Patel:
Kashif Sharma-Patel is a poet, writer and co-founding editor of the87press. Pamphlets include relief I willed it (Gong Farm, 2021), fragments of mutability (Earthbound, 2020) and Suburban Finesse (Sad Press, 2020) co-authored with Ashwani Sharma and Azad Ashim Sharma. furnish, entrap is their debut single-author collection. Kashif writes criticism and runs a newsletter culture hawker: https://kashifsp.substack.com/
