What The Bird Tattoo Hides [Paperback]

Bohm draws a gripping picture of life in Vijaynagar, a village which is his home base when in India, his wife's homeland.? He has stayed there on and off for over four decades.? His poems about many of the villagers reveal people's daily struggles as they work, argue, celebrate, and raise their children, doing what they can to better their lives, some even taking up arms to do so. From all this, Bohm creates his poetry.

Bohm's work challenges the West's falsely exotic and colonial view of India. As he chronicles three generations in a single village, the author evokes a world that is both more haphazard and violent, and also more human and present, than one would otherwise have been able to imagine. Using sensuous, gritty, and stunning language, he confronts the nature of death and change, realizing that Wherever the body is, and no matter / how unknown the locale, / it is home.