Your Own Ox-head Mask as Proof is a suite of poems from George Kalamaras’s ongoing project, The Bone Sutras. Beginning with Cesar Vallejo’s mandate to “wash your skeleton every day,” these poems enact an accretion of imagery that presents perception as, paradoxically, dispersed yet whole. Their central technique dramatizes this interaction of apparent contradictions as reciprocal rather than conflictive. Each poem, written in couplets with Kalamaras’s characteristic Surrealist imagery, draws liberally on the poet’s long-time study and practice of the Hindu-yogic tradition, as well as his immersion in a modern international poetics. Permeated with an intensity of Eros (“I charted the star bites in your body, read your insides by the light of the snow”), the poems delve not only into personal loss and renewal but also into the nuances of language—its possibilities, challenges, complexities, and fragmentations (“Feather me this. Quonset hut my heart. / Why must a were where you? Where were you spoke when I speak?”). Your Own Ox-head Mask as Proof is a deeply imaginative and sensuous book where “Mysteries appear like an extraordinary egg.”

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