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Can you remember the last time you let out a good cry?
A long, liberating release, tears for love, loss or longing, or a lament for the earth, war, disease, humanity, political oppression – all the despair and dissonance that surrounds us?
Cries of joy, delight, pleasure from the extraordinary in the ordinary? Cries of the soul from seeing the magical or experiencing a dear dream come true?
A cry of unspeakable bliss from an intense embrace in ephemera that would last until eternity?
A cry of the purest beauty from a setting sun or the dancing of the winds in your awestruck eyes?
A cry both for the unparalleled beauty and the unbearable burdens of this life?
This book is an ode to our collective cries – unexpressed, silenced, unheard, unvoiced.
“A striking and memorable articulation of the poet’s vexed dharma, as an endangered bearer of urgent witness, which resonates through our war-darkened and ecocidal age.”
- Ranjit Hoskote, award-winning translator and author
“I love the use of words and the slow anger and despair. These poems speak to me through our reality.”
- Arunava Sinha, award-winning translator and author
“Reading these poems together is like having a conversation with a gifted storyteller. She doesn't want you to just listen, she wants you to participate in the stories - for they are also yours, in some sense.”
- Orijit Sen, graphic novelist and design pioneer
“Each line is a tightly controlled clipping from the rolling chyron of poetry that runs beneath the breaking world.”
- Thomas Sharp, award-winning British poet, author, artist, advertising pioneer
ABOUT THE BOOK
Cries (published by Westland, represented by Siyahi) is a slim collection of urgent poems that attempt to articulate our cries in these strange and desperate times.
It takes a time’s crises to invoke cries of hope – this compilation navigates everyday life lived through the contextual sections of Us as a whole, of You as another perspective encountered, and as I – often the voice that you hear yourself most in, an experience intimate, personal and yet universal. The three sections are deeply interwoven, for the I is also You and ultimately, Us.
The poems thread through climate and covid, spin within cyclone and war, spread themselves across the 600-million-year-old islands of Langkawi, conflicted Kashmir and Scottish mountains. They plunge deep into depressive states of mind and at other times delight in the lightness of spring rain and self-love. The eco-poetics channel the continuum of seasons, species, sentiments. Empowering the intuitive lens with rich field experiences, they evoke a unique cultural resonance.
The verses snake through contemporary enchantments and entrapments, pain and possibility, urging you to take a dip in the blender of our collective consciousness, twisting and turning with the magic and the mundane, with emotion and exhaustion.
This post-structuralist work takes shape as an atlas of our shared worlds within, and outside. It is a hope for reflection and ultimately, action, emanating from an earnest empathy for all. Bursting with candour and conviction, the poems come angry and dark, but also look for redemption.
Tongue
each time your tongue trembles or seethes
roll it in the tenderness of hers
each time you feel your jaw clenching
soften it in the wetness of verse.
Becoming one
you are the wings
that the kite misses
you are those strings
pulling the fragile kite
and the child that flies it
the wet grass she runs on
the glass walls cutting across
and the person watching inside
running amok on her corporate chair.
Spring rain
rain-bathed bougainvillea
deeper than the colour of raw passion
velvet awash
honey-dripping palāsh
first showers of the season
and you still look for life’s reason?