Basudhara Roy — Excerpt: A poem is read as much by the ear as by the eye. It establishes a relationship with the reader as much by defying as by conforming to poetic norms. Raychaudhuri’s poems stimulate both vision and sound.
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Listening for the Forest’s Voice: On Kanika Gupta’s The Cursed Land of Lustful Women and The Power of Storytelling (Performance Text with Notes)
Namrata — Excerpt: Gupta begins from a historical contradiction. Classical literature overflows with lush forests and sensuous rivers, yet the voices of forest communities and women are scantly inscribed in the canonical record. Her devised text steps into that absence without pretending to fill it with authenticity.
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Exploring the Self: Allison Field Bell’s Without Woman or Body
Albert Abdul-Barr Wang — Excerpt: The cover photograph taken by the author herself provides a clue to the range of themes: self-portraiture, literary craft, formalism, the female body, whiteness in relation to post-feminist America, and natural landscapes versus constructed interiors.
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Engaging With This Thing Called Life: Neera Kashyap’s Cracks in the Wall
Chitra Gopalakrishnan — Excerpt: Neera Kashyap is quiet in her telling of daily complexities, bewilderment, frailties and failures of ordinary people within the microcosm she creates within each story... Light touches and restraint in her language co-exist with the potency of her querying and divulgences.
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Vinita Agrawal’s Eartha: A Planet’s Cry
Kiran Bhat — Excerpt: Agrawal has written many poetry collections before, but Eartha is the poet at her most coherent, focused, and piercing.