Phil Hansotia Presents Poems of Memory and Discovery

Retired physician, immigrant, family man, and Door County resident Phiroze (Phil) Hansotia has recently released his new collection of poetry, Looking for America: Poems of Memory and Discovery.

The collection, split in three parts – “The Immigrant Experience,” “Family,” and “All Things Considered” – features rich, detailed poetry highlighting Hansotia’s childhood in India, his experience in medical school, and his family – mother, father, wife and children. Hansotia also includes poetry which touches upon a variety of other topics including Hurricane Katrina, school bullies, Tai Chi, Patrick Henry, and, of course, Door County.

Hansotia’s poetry has appeared in Free Verse, Valley Voice, Wisconsin Medical Journal, Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, Peninsula Pulse, and N.E.W. Voices. His earlier poems were collected in a chapbook entitled Somewhere There, published by the Jack Pine Press in Hancock, Wisconsin.

Looking for America is available at local bookstores or by sending a check made out to Caravaggio Press ($12, plus $2 shipping and handling) to Looking for America c/o Caravaggio Press, P. O. Box 41, Ellison Bay, WI 54210.

The following poems by Phil Hansotia are featured in Looking for America:

Monsoons

Imagine living in a crock-pot,
being slowly cooked.
It reminds me of April and May
on the hot streets of Nagpur, in India.
At night the air hung still
unless you slept on a terrace
under a clear, sparkling sky.

In June, with much fanfare,
like wet dancing girls,
the rains came to a
drumbeat of daily expectations.
The vendors looked up,
gathered their goods, sheltered them
as dark rolling bubbles filled the western sky.
The wind kicked up and it rained
and rained, spit lighting and rained,
coughed thunder and rained.

The streets, the fields, all the buckets and jugs,
pots and pans, the waiting reservoirs filled.
It rained in sheets like a giant shower-head
wide-open and sent urchins, stray dogs and
children on vacation laughing and singing in the streets.
The air cooled and the parched earth turned green.
The monsoons had arrived.

A Glass of Glenlivet

Dad came home spent.
His fully charged batteries
drained slowly as he
fought his way
back from the office intrigue
and official indifference.
At home he poured himself
a chilled glass of Glenlivet
with two cubes of ice
and eased himself into
his favorite chair.

At ease at last, he sipped his drink
with the care of an artist drawing paint
and slowly felt his inner light come on.
He roused the books and thoughts
that lay low in the basement of his mind.
His new sunrise brought a glow
just as the outside world
was pulling down its shutters.

Welcome to the Human Body

In the first week of medical school
I shuffled down a formaldehyde corridor
lined with jars of anatomical specimens
and entered a room with cadavers on marble tables.
A man’s body, possibly in his sixties, a small frame
with half-shut eyes, bloated abdomen and
wasted hands, lay ready for dissection.
I wondered who he was and how he got there?
I found it hard to make that first incision.

Cunningham’s manual ignored these thoughts
and moved straight to lay open the chest and
abdomen and had us tracing aorta, femoral artery,
nerves of the brachial plexus down to the hands.
Dissection by day and Gray’s anatomy at night,
I no longer noticed the formaldehyde or the face
with the half-shut eyes. My books had taken over.
In the next few weeks the old man was changing me
even as he was losing himself.