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.
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).
"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. [...] 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
"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. [...] 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
