Showing all 20 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • UNLIKELY JOURNEY

    About the Book

    As happens on all trips, in the pages of this book we find unforeseen questions and unexpected landscapes. These verses are transparent because they speak to us not about what is intuited or remembered but what is seen while trying to establish order, specify limits, and vanquish shadows.

    $12
  • Lighthouse for drowning memories

    About the Book

    It’s in Delhi, dystopian as ever, that Sujatha Mathai continues to live and write today, and I fear her words—“I cannot save my city / Against the degradation of dust”—will echo long into the future, acquiring new meanings.  And yet I’m so happy to read a new book of hers, to see that she’s still writing her poems sharp and clear as glass, full of sympathy for the world and those who suffer.  It makes me feel that literature survives and helps us survive, that it carries more continuity than we think.

    Vivek Narayanan
    Assistant Professor, Department of English, George Mason University

    $16
  • Only the Forest Knows

    About the Book

    “Wings sense what they must”. And poets too. In her third poetry collection, Anindita Sengupta receives and transmits the hues of a planet mad with want, fear, breakdown. At the heart of a maelstrom of (in)humanity and conflagration, dispossession and disease, her poems bite and rage and mourn. From forage fish to polar bears, she is enmeshed and implicated. With her, we sense the natural world’s mysteries as apprehensible, but “not teachable”. In these poems, breath is the seam that will rip and tear; pain the only climate we can count on. As we embrace deception and vulnerability, we coil in and out of the quieter spaces we contain and are contained by. Hers is our hunger to understand, even hope, so that we might begin again to believe in “small miracles”, to persist, like the algae, “in a world without light.”

    – Sampurna Chattarji

     

    Anindita Sengupta asks: “How to speak of violence without /repeating it. What language? What tone? What / memory?” Throughout this coruscating collection, her fluid and inventive poiesis attempts to answer these questions, weaving contingent and deeply human meanings out of personal and collective trauma. Only the Forest Knows is a profoundly accomplished, intelligent work. Sengupta creates an urgent, sensual language that speaks out of the raw contradictions and anguish of the present. This is a poetry tempered by fire, loss and sorrow that
    yet, as Rilke said, “nevertheless still praises”: a hard-won beauty that is its own hope.

    Alison Croggon

     

    $20
  • CogVerse

    About the Book

    Vivekanand Selvaraj’s debut book of poems, ‘Cog Verse’ has clever cogs that rotate and fit snugly into the amiable cog machine in succinct poetry.  His prose poetry dealing with the internal life of a freshman and the business of medicine as a profession is unflinchingly incisive. Speaking of his ancestors and grandparents on both sides, nowhere does he forget his Tamil ethos and the book comes off as startlingly original.

    — Sivakami Velliangiri

    _____________________

    Here, in these poems, the object-worlds of a pre-liberalized India rub shoulders with the pandemic present, incongruent, yet strangely essential. Here, failure is rebellion, and rebellion in itself, becomes an illusion. Yet, Selvaraj’s poems document a severe critique of the institutions we hold as pristine – the medical school, the hospital, the deep state. Oftentimes, this critique is that of an insider, who, in spite of the said critique, feels depleted, hopeless, leaving us – the readers – asking for more. And, it is often done through careful manipulation of the white spaces on a page, unconventional line-break and a playful engagement with the very idea of lyric subjectivity.

    — Nandini Dhar

    ___________________

    Vivekanand is a poet of spaces. He isn’t interested in the broader themes of things that happen every day. But he is still interested in the façade of equanimity, everyday cruelty, and mundanity. These poems are Vivekanand’s way of chronicling stories for posterity, but also because everyone else has simply forgotten to catalogue them. These aren’t poems you’ve read before. Vivekanand isn’t a poet you’ve met before. Unique in his writing and assured in his voice, Vivekanand’s CogVerse is a necessary addition to your poetry collection.

    —- Manjiri Indurkar

    $20
  • Stray Poems

    About the Book

    Abhay K. strikes such a cheerful, sensual and sunny note in so many of his individual poems…with a pure, ringing sound and rhythm all of his own.

    —Gabriel Rosenstock, Poet, Ireland

     

    Abhay K. is a trusted guide to modern poetry, to the journey in which we are seeking truth, peace and justice…feel the spirit of God coursing through his lines.

    —Indran Amirthanayagam, Poet, USA

    About the Book

    Stray Poems takes you on a poetic ride across the world, to the moon and planets in our Solar System and to the far reaches of the Universe and then back to our glorious Earth! Bon Voyage!

    $20
  • Mapping Gondwana

    About the Book

    I was moved by the ways in which, at key moments in the dialogue, rhythms shift, and instead of call-response between the poems, we go into each poet’s memory – a call-response between present and past. As they traversed back and forth between private parallel hum – after all, hum is “we” in Hindi – and direct synapse, I loved how freely they responded to both inner reverie and external stimuli. In some of Ari’s poems it felt like he was revisiting earlier trips to India – so that the duet was not restricted to what has just been received but what has always been residual – suggesting collaboration as a pretext – for return? Ari’s riverine contemplations counterpoint Subhro’s archetypal majhi (the boatman) made unmetaphorical. From Tagore’s golden boat to Subhro’s carbon kayak, what rapids have been crossed?

    —Sampurna Chattarji

    $16
  • Vital Signs

    About The Book

    What happens when you pay attention to which foot leads – when you walk? Or when we really attend to the pleasures of eating, or of a changing sky? What if we realised that paradise is found all around us – Shangri La behind bus stops?

    Amlanjyoti Goswami’s poetry is full of these Vital Signs, these details of wonder. Stringing words on a high wire, his is a rare ability to pause time, so we can look, really look, and live. Even the act of repairing a shoe can be meditative and philosophical in his hands. And within the glimpses of grand ideas there is a humility, a reminder that life is there to be felt, touched, lived, in the quietest of moments.

    The laureate of ‘the idea of forever, inside an instant’, Amlan’s poetry carries within it, that most unfashionable of qualities – a sense of grace – but also the quiet wisdom that a life is a series of sensations that become memories. He shows us how the mythic can be ordinary, and how the ordinary becomes mythic. –Rishi Dastidar

    $16
  • On The High Wire

    About The Book

    “How timely the invisible rain appears to be / when we have stopped expecting it,” says Siddhartha Menon: words that might equally apply to this substantial and somewhat unexpected collection that establishes him as a major Indian poet.  The vocabulary is often unfussy and, despite the book’s title, the form carries no hijinks, but every line, you feel, has been tested, every line holds in the solitary practice of the mind.  Here place is not a romance of names but an ethics of speaking and a scrupulous attention to both the immediate and the far away, the ants on a teaspoon or the spacecraft on the edge of Saturn, the sentry who “could be” a poet or the unfortunate politics of the state that holds us and others captive, an anonymous bellboy or the great actor Irrfan Khan who could make himself anonymous.  Some of the most dazzling poems in the book are sequences; always, we can be sure that following Menon’s thought through will reward us and leave room for us.  It’s like a magic trick with no sleight of hand.  The “certitudes” may be “green and gleaming” but the “eyes betray the sting of wisdom”.

    – Vivek Narayanan

    $16
  • Encyclopaedia of Forgotten Things

    About The BooK

    Gökçenur Ç distils poetry from of the quotidian, revealing everyday objects, surroundings, and relationships in a new light, marvelling at the miracle of their poetic potential. This is perhaps because he lives the double life of someone whose “perfect routine of a married middle-aged engineer” couldn’t be further from the literary world he inhabits so fully and effortlessly as a poet, translator, festival organiser and initiator of many exchanges and poetry translation gatherings. All these roles are indispensable, and in his poems, he pays equal homage to the great poets he has translated, the poet friends of his generation some of whom have translated him, the woman he shares his life with — and language itself, often at odds with all the words that populate his universe. This long overdue English edition of his selected poems with a list of translation credits and acknowledgements not only makes his work available to a new readership, but also tells a story of deep affinities, friendships and collaborations that are the lifeblood of his creative practice.

    – Alexandra Buchler, Director of LAF Literature Across Frontiers

    “What a vigorous, deep thinking, and companionable voice is Gokcenur C.’s. He may be a new poet to us English speakers and readers, but he’s been active and well-respected in European circles, and especially in Turkish contemporary literature, for many years now. Encyclopedia of Forgotten Things offers us a big-hearted gathering of his rich narrative lyrics—poems of family, culture, and cities of “soaked neighborhoods,” poems of brilliant aphorisms (“Stones grow heavier where they stand”) and expansive attentions, poems of sorrow, eroticism, and a bountiful yearning for natural connections: “If could speak urdu / I would teach urdu to the rain….” The clarity of Gokcenur C.’s poetic idiom is especially striking—intimate, friendly, and possessed of an intense depth of passion, personal intelligence, and social engagement. It’s a poetry elixir made of measurement, music, and that intangible ingredient, soulfulness. Add paradox, his primary tool, and you have Gokcenur C.’s deepest delightful secret in Encyclopedia of Forgotten Things. If something is forgotten, how can it be catalogued for our reference, our pleasure? Maybe that’s been poetry’s magic, all along.”

    – David Baker, Poet, Editor Kenyon Review

     

    The poetry of Gökçenur Ç is vibrantly alive and teeming with images, full of the details and patterns of everyday life while alert to the larger forces that shape it. It is ‘world’ poetry in that it engages as eloquently with the textures of locality as it does the global communities of writers and translators with which it is in dialogue. A quiet pulse of humour runs though this fine selection in which the universe is animated, made strange, and returned to us full of meaning in ‘the scribble of the space’.

    – Zoë Skoulding, Poet, Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing, Bangor University

    $20
  • WALK

    About the Book

    This is a breath-taking experiment involving three poets, four languages, a pandemic and a million miles of migration. You will not find a bleeding heart here nor any cheap sentiment. Here is a watchful eye and a savage tongue. Here is a calligrapher’s pen and a bow to Ezra Pound. Mustansir Dalvi’s poetry has always meant something more to me than the best words in the best order. Here he shows us the order of things in a disordered world and we are humbled by this act of bravery and of empathy.

    Jerry Pinto, poet and translator

    Asylum, I want a poem and other poems

    First published as an e-chapbook by Yavanika Press in that dreadful plague year, 2020, Mustansir Dalvi’s brilliant and memorable WALK is an act of homage to the suffering of those millions of Indians, already living precariously between village and metropolis, who were turned into migrants in their own land – forced to walk thousands of miles home, on what was effectively a death march, by a callous State and a society that improvises rather than systematising effective forms of compassion.

    WALK now returns, under the Poetrywala imprint, as a surging polyphony. Dalvi is joined in this splendid quadriga of a book by Hemant Divate and Udayan Thakker, who have translated these poems into Marathi and Gujarati respectively; the author has rendered himself into a vibrant Hindi. This relay of versions is completed by Sudhir Patwardhan’s painterly testimony to the anguish of the Covid refugees caught up in a humanitarian catastrophe. A poet and translator, Dalvi infuses his writing with multilingual resonance and quicksilver diversity, shuttling among idioms and registers, in-group argot and makeshift patois. As befits the gravity and universal urgency of its subject, this book will reach readers in four languages simultaneously, saying to them, to us: Never forget!

    Ranjit Hoskote, Poet, art critic and cultural theorist

    $20
  • The Tattooed Teetotaller and other wonders

    About the Book

    We say mind the book, it’s out of control.
    But it’s author says
    ‘Nonsense verse helps its writers escape their resident demons,
    setting them free to deal with the more transient ones of mischief.
    At time I’ve tried to use that freedom to highlight contemporary absurdities,
    at other times to write about those of a not-too-distant colonial past.
    Readers will find that not everything here is nonsense, like the poem below.
    But I hope they also find that however disastrous our falls into folly may be,
    they can also be luminous’
    Like Dictators
    Rats are strict in their regulations.
    Like dictators they regulate
    meals and nations
    along lines of bite.

    $18
  • Abstract Oralism

    About the Book

    Yamini Dand Shah, with this new book Abstract Oralism, captures both precisely and remarkably the mysterious and elusive world of the Kachchh of Western Gujarat. Her metaphors and similes transport the reader towards this ancient terrain where Indus Valley peoples once flourished. Conceptually advanced and sophisticated, the poetry of this book causes us to reconsider our place in the world: in the light of the author’s extraordinary perception that translates earthly experience into a uniquely beautiful expression of the human condition.

    -KEVIN MCGRATH, Poet Laureate, Harvard University

    In the ‘Abstract Oralism’, Yamini reveals the beguiling mythic and mimetic history of the dangerously luminous, sensuous, and ephemeral beauty of the desert of Rann of Kachchh leaving us astonished and redeemed at once. ‘Sifting through soiled pages of an anti-modern, abridged dictionary’ of memories, she weaves embroidered tales of palaeolithic biographies of forgotten people in an experimental genre of speech-therapy with fierce emotional power. By turns poignant, playful and ironic, Yamini’s deceptively layered linguistic dreamscapes break new ground in experiencing hallucinatory minimalism in poetry. A mesmerizing debut!

    -ASHWANI KUMAR, Poet, Writer and Public Policy Researcher

    $20