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| Pages | 100 |
About the Book
Pooja Ugrani listens to nature amidst the thump-thump-thump of construction. Forest fires, dragons and rabbits materialise without warning, a series of ambushes that test the city-dweller’s hard-won survival instincts. Words stick their tongues out, cheekily unfamiliar. Ugrani participates physically in the making of her poems, not only through photos, but also through the palpability of the body’s smears, spills and stains. Here is a poet testing her wings, where dissension may well be a heartbeat away from dissection.
—SAMPURNA CHATTARJI, author of Unmappable Moves and Space Gulliver.
Pooja’s poems do what women’s poetry has been doing forever. They shut their mouth so tight that the stifled words ricochet back in and make their hearts thud like a talking drum. And they sign it off with today's date. – MAITHREYI KARNOOR, novelist and author.
Pooja Ugrani constructs poems as one might build a home; brick by tender brick, with the mortar of memory, desire, and defiance. Her verse moves fluidly between the everyday and the elemental, where the domestic is never mundane but a site of quiet resistance and reimagining. This world of words measures the dimensions of love, labour, and loss through the delicate instruments of memory, architecture, and motherhood. She writes of labour, love, and dissent as acts of design – as deliberate gestures that hold the self together.
Ugrani’s dissent is luminous, not loud. It hums through acts of nurture, through refusal, through the courage to remain soft in a world that demands armour. Formally supple and sensorial, cerebral and sensuous, her poems fold the architectural and the emotional into one continuum.
– SRIVIDYA SIVAKUMAR, poet.
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