Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul – författare

The Goldfish is a sumptuous, surreal exploration of femininity. The poet inhabits the voice of a goldfish through a series of linguistically experimental poems which plunge us into the glass bowl and invite us to gaze out. The poems are in turn sensual, spiky, and queasy, as the poet satirizes the patriarchy and issues a rallying cry for women broken down by society. Halfway through the book, the scope opens out to the world beyond the goldfish bowl, via the story of a free spirit passing through customs, a paean "to our white husbands", and a letter which heals old wounds.

A mind-blowing collection of poems about love, life, and a long-overdue introduction to the unique worldview of Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi. Ikhda captures the intensity and wildness of love, sex, motherhood and family ties through her heady and sensual poems and character sketches. She flexes and chivvies the English language into hitherto undreamt-of places, dipping occasionally into French and Italian, and presents it all back to the reader in compelling, undeniably truthful nuggets, with exquisite tenderness and humanity.Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi has worked in television, advertising and as a scriptwriter on a sitcom in Indonesia. She performed her poetry for the first time in 2011, at Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. She now lives in Naples, where she is enjoying her new role as mother to her little boy Corentin.