“What Sankar Roy knows in Moon Country is that we are all aliens but for our poetry. This brilliant book takes the “world weary” and exchanges gravity for science, science fiction, and imagination in poems that are clear, strong and sweet. After all, poetry is an organic alteration in itself; and, it is only poetic intelligence that makes a book vibrate with originality. The landscapes, terrains and vistas in Moon Country are spiritual dimensions. The topics are man-made (poet-made) articulate accounts of imagined experience. But then why is there so much truth found here? Because poetry finds what is most human in the most highly wrought of fictive journeys. Perhaps poets with their spiritual inquiries are the brightest stars in our galaxies after all. Excellent craft makes for excellent poetry. These vivid poems are worlds in which poetry enters ethereal and enchanted places in the universe, and lands safely at home for the reader. In Moon Country, our material existences are transformed, and poetry’s best ambitions are satisfied.”
—Grace Cavalieri
“In Sankar Roy’s wildly original debut volume, the “Moon country” of the title is America—particularly its strange, vacant suburbs where, in Roy’s book, it seems always to be night. The only constant feature of this landscape is the moon. No fixed landmass—no big trees—only a blackish sea....The inhabitants, always awake, stand on their front lawns and greet anyone who might be passing their way. Moon Country is part science fiction allegory, part social commentary, part loving evocation of American loneliness and alienation. Among the inhabitants of the suburbs the narrator is himself an alien, a vulnerable and acutely aware observer of his own otherness: “There is no landing station/ no ticket counter, no stationmaster. No one/will be there to receive you.” I cannot remember another book, certainly not a first book, that evokes and inhabits our alien nation with such originality. “It bothers us to be ourselves,” writes Roy. How exactly right that seems. If we are not bothered by ourselves before reading Moon Country, after reading this wise book, we certainly will be.”
—Lynn Emanuel
“The poems of Moon Country occupy a larger future, the territory mapped out by the poetic prose of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. We, the reader, feel both exhilaration and uneasiness. Sankar Roy is a lyric poet not bound by the earth, a poet of cosmic imagination. What does it mean to be an alien?”
—Michael Wurster
