Ms. Laskar's poetry explores dislocation. The title poem plays with the idea of turning back time or catching a glimpse of the future - but the narrator wakes to find that all the best plans are in fate's hands. She writes of the underbellies of fairytales and myths - and how, sometimes, change and wisdom follow great personal upheaval. 

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There’s a lot of heaven in this book: constellations, “expanding giants,” “the puny sun,” “stars already dead but still shining holy.” And the moon, the moon.

Don’t be fooled. These poems are made of red earth: the lives and blood of ordinary people. The gods are included for metaphor and balance, with their pomegranates and tridents. The astronomical proposal that “our destiny is a function of collapse” lurks beneath the book’s surface. But it’s the contemporary spinning world Devi S. Laskar is describing in Anastasia Maps.

In a deft chorus of voices and a multitude of styles, Laskar — the “uninvited guest witnessing all” — turns her gaze on everything from Sanskrit psalms to simple rain to “those deadbeat stars” and shows them to us upended, startling, and new.