Showing 1–20 of 21 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Where Is the Mouth of That Word?

    About the Book

    I breathed. I looked up. I saw her standing in the line of fire, “simply standing/on the last line of
    this page”, asking, as she looked me in the eye, “Where are you reading from?”

    And that, dear readers, who are about to encounter Maryam’s poems for the first time, is the
    question.
    You can Google her, you can hear her speak 1 , you can explore her intersecting engagements as an essayist, translator, and academic.
    But first, you can find her here, as I did, in a selection of her poems – from early to later, from the spoken word to the “vocal infection of the page”, from rant to reflection, plea to command.
    You could, in obeyance, “Turn the page, and leave!”
    You could be sentenced
    to an expired word:
    (Silence)

    You could hear the tanin (echo) of Sepehri’s hich (nothingness) reverberating at the same frequency with which you see Dali’s ‘The Echo of the Void’ hovering in your line of vision.
    You could, and you will.
    For now, all that matters is knowing (asking!) where you read from.
    And as for the title we eventually chose – where is the mouth of that word?
    Wherever there is one – fearless enough to speak it.

    – Sampurna Chattarji

     

    $16
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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