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by Nabanita Kanungo

Nabanita Kanungo’s collection is simultaneously an elegy and a victory song. A documentation of the heartbreaks that have plagued our subcontinent for the past century or so, her poems re-define the lyric form, chronicling the unfolding of a personal self-framed by larger political events. Here, history appears as a long, continuous saga of violence, in which Partition memories remain juxtaposed within the everyday lived realities and violences of neoliberal Indian cities. With this collection, Kanungo provides a ghostly account of quotidian survival—stories that remain forever out of official histories—and re-defines the meaning of Anglophone India political poetry of contemporary times. -Nandini Dhar Nabanita Kanungo’s poems ache with an awareness of how poetry cannot truly evoke anything but absence, of how “It rains and words say nothing”; “Only memory is green”. In this tragedy, Kanungo finds the only solace available to the a luminous quality in the every day, the “Mirror/where things are simply written / with light”. These poems work in the liminal spaces of the world and of the self, between the present moment and its turning into memory, between words and rain. -Arun Sagar

94 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018