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About the Book
Devashish Makhija’s Bewilderness announces its visceral bridging of self and nature in its title. The baffling challenges are outside the self, coming at the self as a profusion of stimuli from the mega-city, nature’s receding kingdom, and the horrors of the political. But they are inside the self too, as it fashions itself from fragments of childhood memory, responses to paintings that hold out inspiration, and empathetic connections forged with vulnerable Others in predicaments of distress. These poems bear resonant witness to the age in which they are written – an age governed by the call of the siren and the insistence of the curfew, the militarization of civil life and the degradation of rivers and mountains. Bewilderness captivates us with its vividly palpable images, its exhilarating shifts of tempo, and its plangent, deeply moving tonality.
– Ranjit Hoskote
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