Image-Description

Menka Shivdasani

Menka Shivdasani has three previous collections of poetry. Her first book, Nirvana at Ten Rupees, was published by XAL-Praxis in 1990. Her second poetry collection Stet first appeared in 2001, and her third collection, Safe House, was published in 2015 by Paperwall Media. Menka has edited an anthology of women’s writing, If the Roof Leaks, Let it Leak, for Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW), and two anthologies of contemporary Indian poetry for the American e-zine www.bigbridge.org. She is also co-translator of an anthology of Sindhi Partition poetry, Freedom and Fissures (Sahitya Akademi). Menka has been published widely, both in India and elsewhere, and her work is represented in Indian Literature in English: An Anthology, the Second-Year Bachelor of Arts degree textbook of the University of Mumbai. In 1986, she played a key role in founding the Poetry Circle. Her work as a journalist includes a stint with South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, and the publication of thirteen books as co-author/ editor, three of which were released by the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

  • Frazil

    About the Book

    Menka Shivdasani’s poetry is both original and strikingly unusual, not just her tangential way of putting things across, but also how thought process and imagination run away with the poem, and make it exciting. An experience is translated into another experience and then gets mixed with fancy in a juice blender. Chopping lettuce, she’ll be assailed by visions—burning bride,  politician, a ‘wounded Hiroshima’, and finally a finger-chopping Nazi. A poem about separation will end with her handling ‘alien porcelain’ at a tea party. For over three decades the excitement she brings to her fine poetry has never deserted her.

    $16