In Arun Kolatkar’s poem “Meera,” from his collection Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), a street sweeper puts modest piles of trash on display along the curb in front of the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay (now Mumbai). These “installations,” Kolatkar writes, “might as well have been / titled ‘Homage to Bombay, one,’ / ‘Homage to Bombay, two,’ and so on, / since a good bit of the city stands / on sweepings such as these.” The latter bit is a reference to the land reclaimed from the sea for the purpose of filling in marshes and inlets with rubble and refuse, linking what were once seven islands into a single

“Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” This passage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11), describing a human body undergoing an underwater metamorphosis, has particular significance for twentieth-century art. In 1947, Jackson Pollock made Full Fathom Five the title of one his most materially dense drip paintings, suggesting a kind of transubstantiation. The nails, tacks, and cigarette butts embedded in the canvas had been raised up