Pooja Ugrani, architect, teacher and mother, lives her life in two cities, Bombay and Bangalore. Her poems are included in the anthologies The Shape of a Poem – The Red River Book of Contemporary Erotic Poetry, The Kali project anthology – Invoking the Goddess within/ Indian Women’s Voices by Indie Blue Publishing LLC, the Yearbook of Indian Poetry 2022 and Po’try, an anthology of Bangalore poets. Her poem, Gundalamma Palem was shortlisted as one of the forty poems out of over thousand international entries for the Alpine Fellowship 2023. Her poetry has been published in The Punch Magazine, Cafe Dissensus Everyday, Mom Egg Review (New York), Hākārā, Voice and Verse Poetry
Magazine (Hong Kong), The Tiger Moth Review (Singapore), The Alipore Post, The Woman Inc – TWI Poetry, and the RIC Journal (Jaipur-Paris).
Ugrani was invited to read at the Bangalore Poetry Festival and by the Champaca bookstore at the Bangalore International Center on the occasion of International Womens’ Day. She was a featured poet at
Tuesdays with the Bard at Urban Solace, Ulsoor, in December 2019.
While she is relaxing, Pooja Ugrani explores origami with children and adults, sings Bollywood songs and dreams of a trek in the Himalayas.
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My Home is Dissent
$16About 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.