Three Metamorphoses: Novellas in Verse & Prose
by Amit Majmudar
*available for pre-order*
Orison Books
paper / $20.00
ISBN: 978-1-949039-62-7Distributed to the trade by Itasca Books
952-223-8373 / orders@itascabooks.com
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
ABOUT THE BOOK
Amit Majmudar's textual triptych Three Metamorphoses recasts and transforms foundational stories from Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism in verse and poetic prose. But these are no simple retellings: mystical Islamic origin story adopts narrative devices from Milton, the Christian Gospels are interwoven with Greek tragedy and modern politics, and virtuosically shifting Hindu verse forms take their cue from Ovid. There is perhaps no other poet today who could accomplish such a wide-ranging tour de force.
PRAISE
“You have to go back to W. H. Auden to find a writer with Amit Majmudar’s range, intelligence, prolificacy, and ambition. He brings moral seriousness to everything he does, though he can write with the lightest of touches (never more in evidence than in these Three Metamorphoses). He is crafting a body of work that one can live in.”
—Christian Wiman
“In Three Metamorphoses, Amit Majmudar brings a particularly contemporary, particularly American brand of pluralism to bear on our most ancient human stories. In the spirit of great syncretist-poets like Vyasa, Ovid, and the Gospel writers, he approaches his own impossible, beautiful undertaking first as a true poet and storyteller. The book does what it does, without fear, and the force of Majmudar’s language and imagination makes it work. The result is the only serious recent book I can think of that functions simultaneously as a collection of adventure stories and a philosophical page-turner. Tendentious in no direction, always avidly interested and conversant, Majmudar has given himself and us the freedom to follow his path of ingenious associations, and, in mining some of the Abrahamic and Vedic texts most concerned with people’s fortunes and place in the cosmic hierarchy, he might also help us toward a more humane grasp of one another’s beliefs.”
—Joshua Mehigan
“There are hinge times in history when we no longer recognize the world, when the stories we tell ourselves no longer convince us. Then poets can turn to myth, the place where stories are formed. Henri Michaux at the moment of the Second World War wrote of 'the voracious eye of the origin.' In 2025 Amit Majmudar relives our foundational narratives with a wild brilliance. The questions are dead serious: Can we love without idolatry? Can we wield power without estrangement? But the invention is coruscating. You might think of the midrash that God created the universe in a spirit of play. You'll find Adam and Eve in Paradise like 'two pandas locked in a cage, the male refusing to mate.' U.S. counterinsurgency will infiltrate the Gospels and Greek tragedy. In a section informed by Indic cosmology, the text itself wheels off the page. Always Majmudar finds lines—'the minutes that passed through me had little hooks'; 'she is any river / where something is drowning'—that do what great poetry does: open silence, lead us to our unknown life.”
—D. Nurkse
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent and forthcoming books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and Things my Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026).