Infiltrator or inhabitant? In Treasurer of Piggy Banks, Indian poet Vinod Kumar Shukla sees the world through both lenses at once. All details are local yet canonical, and when inside his lyric mind, we are rooted, and the roots are spreading far and wide. Shukla’s ability to see things through their opposite illuminates what is hardest to comprehend with aphoristic yet surreal clarity, from environmental collapse to the way our own deaths are snug inside our lives.

These poems are translated from Hindi with deft humor and acrobatic muscle by poet and essayist Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who writes in his introduction that Shukla’s lines are so unique to him, “you could put them on a check, and it will be honored at any literary bank.” You can’t hoard or even spend the wealth of the lines in this collection, but the shiny, slippery, and threatened value of the world accrues through them.