Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-man Eating Tiger-toy Machine!!!

Daljit Nagra's long-awaited second collection of poems takes its name from an automaton of a tiger ravaging a soldier of the British Empire. And that is pretty much the focus of this collection. Each page lives in the shadow and debt of the Empire and how it changed an entired nation - nay, created an entire nation of confused diverse people.

The poems are tender, funny and biting. There is a savage intention here.

Daljit Nagra creates his own inimitable linguistic bhaji: where Shakespeare meets the Subcontinent in a range of forms from English sonnets to spectacular displays of 'bollyverse' or the tender love songs of the monsoon. The poems take their bearings from cornershops and classrooms, the strange, part-arcadian, part-hellish streets of 'Londonstan' and the places where the north of England collides with the Punjab: from Larkin to the ladoos in Raja t'Wonder Dog. Little escapes Nagra's tigerish gaze: race relations, family feuds, cultural inheritance, religious bigotry, the British honours system, Rudyard Kipling, the blurring of Kevin Keegan with Kabbadi. Comic, hard-hitting, passionate, satirical, Daljit Nagra has written a book that is as powerfully thought-provoking as it is delightful.