The Repetition of Exceptional Weeks is a speculation about relationships, and how an inability to say things well can dislocate places, languages, and centers. Poetry, screenplay, novel? A wayward path through the meeting places, unmolding from a place with loving attunement.
Rajnesh Chakrapani is the author of the speculative chapbook Brown People who Speak English published by Guesthouse. He received a Pen/Heim translation fund grant and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Fulbright, and the Center for the study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at Washington University, St. Louis.
Praise
Raj Chakrapani's TheRepetition of Exceptional Weeks is an experimental novel, a lyric poem, a book of portraiture, a plural memoir of lockdown's phenomenological rupture. To move within it is to be carried by a double current of photograph and text, like "a body of water that could be a picture or a communion," which runs with a desire for something in place of "the image and the body in conflict." Through this motion, Chakrapani locates us between the question of place and the layered and shifting map of that question whose coordinates mark what we can say of ourselves. The Repetition of Exceptional Weeks is a brilliant work which opens full of feeling the construction of a dislocation of being here and/or there, from here or from there, in a struggle to find our place with ourselves and among others.
— Lewis Freedman, author of I Want Something Other Than Time
