Showing all 9 results

  • The Compass Bird

    About the Book

    Observant and meditative, lit with gentle whimsy, Siddhartha Menon’s work on the animal world leads us from ornithology to ontology, detail to dazzling insight, in a wingbeat. Here is a book in which the reverie of snails, the ‘mynahness’ of mynahs, the unhurried gaze of nilgai, becomes a way to reflect on all the eternal questions—time, belonging, love, purpose, a world ‘stained with stillness’, in which ‘those who attend have the last word’. One of the most delightful new books of poetry I have read this year.

    – Arundhathi Subramaniam

     

    $15
  • All That I Wanna Do (Marathi)

    About the Book

    Dear Sanjeev,
    I read your poem yesterday ( last evening). Globalisation, and the consequent private Americanisation, corporatisation, computers, mobiles, mall culture and the decline of humanity
    in every aspect of life is your concern, and mine too. That you and I have felt that comes with this new kind of life, and the regret that we feel because we cannot deter this decline or escape from it, the sarcastic presentation of the never-ending story of our contemporary miseries appear in your in the poem one after another; and interestingly (your) style neither accepts any poetic form nor it is written in any poetic language, and just as you were exhausted while carving a new definition of poetry, I was exhausted while reading your poem – this is what precisely I want to tell you by writing this exhausting second sentence. What you have expressed in this poem is the philosophy of this new way of life. Of course, I think it's significant that while presenting this philosophy afresh, you haven’t pretended that you are a philosopher!
    Yours
    Hemant Divate
    August 28, 2004

    $16
  • All that I Wanna Do (English)

    About Book

    Dear Sanjeev

    I read your poem yesterday ( last evening). Globalisation, and the consequent private Americanisation, corporatisation, computers, mobiles, mall culture and the decline of humanity in every aspect of life is your concern, and mine too.

    That you and I have felt that comes with this new kind of life, and the regret that we feel because we cannot deter this decline or escape from it, the sarcastic presentation of the never-ending story of our contemporary miseries appear in your in the poem one after another; and interestingly (your)  style neither accepts any poetic form nor it is written in any poetic language, and just as you were exhausted while carving a new definition of poetry, I was exhausted while reading your poem – this is what precisely I want to tell you by writing this exhausting second sentence.

    What you have expressed in this poem is the philosophy of this new way of life.

    Of course, I think it’s significant that while presenting this philosophy afresh, you haven’t pretended that you are a philosopher!

    Yours

    Hemant Divate

    August 28, 2004

    $16
  • Obsessed with Life

    About the Book

    “Mozetič’s verse conjures a distinctly gay way of looking at the world. It is both placid and paranoid, opening the world into paper-thin layers of sex, loneness and non-disingenuous self-reflection. His lyric has a remarkable flow, his language is persuasively simple, and his tone is forthright, all of which give the shattered heart at the core of this book a strange magnetic force.”

        – Akhil Katyal, poet, translator, scholar and queer activist

    $10
  • 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 Satchidanandan

    Babitha 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

    $16
  • Salt & Pepper

    About the Book

    Salt and Pepper, Sukrita’s selected poems, present an eloquent, word-induced
    silence articulated with remarkable ease. In the centre of the
    multisensory, reflective silence dwells memory that pesters and heals, and
    shapes a deeper understanding of self and existence, taking one beyond the
    mere unmasking of a past. What adds luminosity to Sukrita’s densely textured
    poems is the layered and fluid exploration of life experience, without any sense
    of closure or finality. — Shafey Kidwai

    —-

    Words are not just words, there is a long journey of emotion, thought and
    experience behind them with which Sukrita weaves the weft and the warp of her
    poems in shades of Salt and Pepper.— Nirupama Dutt


    Girija Sharma: Silence emerges in these poems as a powerful metaphor in the interplay of
    images which are impressionistic, symbolic and existential all at once. All noise is cancelled
    –what remain are words in the purest form building a symphony of silence.


    —-

    Madhavi Apte: Sukrita’s poems are on the one hand illusive and on the other potent like her
    own modern, abstract paintings. Most poems combine the elements of a mystique, the erotic
    and the emotional, personal and impersonal. The poems are grounded and yet ethereal.
    Basudhara Roy : Many-layered, teasing in its apparent simplicity, and haunting in its
    profundity…Animated by her painter’s consciousness, Sukrita’s images are terse, pictorial
    and at the same time, both concrete and abstract.
    The compression, precision, lightness and luminosity of these poems is undeniable. There is,
    in them, a simplicity, intensity and finesse that characterizes classical Eastern forms like the
    haiku and the tanka.

    —–
    Shyista Khan: the poems reflect an unmediated subjectivity… The
    poetic consciousness borders between self-effacement and self
    assertion….

    $20
  • Between Seas

    About the Book

    Elizabeth Grech’s poems are featherlight and firefly. They are moon and water, star and sky. There is in them such strength that only the elemental can contain. She marks the brutal moments of separation with such candour and delicacy, I marvel at her gift. Love of every hue finds a place here—maternal, filial, fraternal, sensual. Love of her native Malta of blessed seas and sunkissed land; love for lost wildness; never-blind, always-aware that love will break into smithereens, only to be gathered and tested again. Beautifully translated into an English that allows her poems to nestle, shape within shape, sound within sound, a series of small, sensitive unfurlings. Unafraid of evanescence, Grech repairs our mortal hurts. Anyone who has ever loved a child, a woman, a man, a sibling, a parent, a homeland will find in these pages a poet’s tender ministrations.

    — SAMPURNA CHATTARJI

    $10
  • 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 DOSHI
     Lethal tales of sex and death that left me pining for more of Sampurna Chattarji’s mysterious lyric inventions.
    —JEET THAYIL
    $20