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Forty Five Shades of Brown
About the Book
Babitha Marina Justin’s poems, woven around self, nature, and body, have an organic architecture, gothic or temple-like, with metaphors working like sculpted images or murals around a central experience. They are honest, at times confessional, often with memories from childhood and adolescence for their raw materials; but they do not shy away from natural calamities and existential crises. Babitha's poems are at once deeply Indian and instinctively feminine in their deployment of images and the organization of experiences.
– K SatchidanandanBabitha Marina Justin has a distinct voice that is passionately lyrical and personal to the point of abandon, and in these COVID times, poetry too has also taken a Corona-Shaped turn. Her world is not only herself, but her neighbourhood, and the larger country which she peppers with a persistent historical awareness, of the Muziris and the Jews. She celebrates their joys and mourns the murky, screaming out the lurking fury in her unique verses.
– Sivakami Velliangiri -
Unmappable Moves
About the Book
Reading Unmappable Moves, I had the strangest sensation of time expanding and closing in. These are taut, enigmatic poems—lightning flashes with bright, insistent heartbeats.—TISHANI DOSHILethal tales of sex and death that left me pining for more of Sampurna Chattarji’s mysterious lyric inventions.—JEET THAYIL