‘Often enigmatic, always exquisitely shaped, the poems in Mani Rao’s So That You Know introduce us to an ensemble of previous and future selves. Except that we can’t always tell which is which. Despite the promise of fair warning in its title, this collection does not prepare us for the everyday reality that its pensive, urbane poems transfigure into a minefield of anomaly and dissonance. So That You Know confronts us with fruit that resist etiquette, with vistas of a mutable world of hazard and tremor, eyed warily over the edge of a coffee mug. Dwelling on a mother’s cabinet of fears for her daughter, for instance, Rao writes: “No wonder I am so fearless / All the panic safe with her.” Objects, places, animals, limbs—all these show a tendency, at once alarming and delightful, to run, hide, change places and alter themselves here. At the core of this book lies a generative tension between presence and persona, essential to the lifelong project of self-fashioning, with all its attendant risks. How do we know who to be, these poems ask us. Mani Rao’s So That You Know is a wry, witty and bracing instruction manual in both defining, and defying, oneself.’
– Ranjit Hoskote