Beyond Thorns
August, 2022
Beyond Thorns is a poetic avowal of the fringe between the human world and nature. It goes beyond imagination into the realm of perception and existence itself. It is an endearing acceptance of sorrow that is ingrained in the being's interactions with nature. The poetry in this collection subsumes romantic and philosophical (almost prophetic) undertones, as it comes to grips with lived experiences of love, nature, and God. The poems dive subsurface and head-on into the world that forever evades understanding and attempts to emerge with whiffs of its scent while also with the knowledge that grasping the world is never possible. This book attempts to open the dark room of philosophy by engaging the senses but also by delving into the unconscious recesses of the poetic mind and an inner darkness of being. It is an attempt to see through the thick honey-like darkness of life and float a boat to the other side, into the domains of happiness and love.
The Fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah: Journeys Through Subalternity and Agency
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK
This book is an insightful work on Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction, and explores the different valences of oppression and agency, subjectivity, memory, race, gender, place, solidarity, class, and crime. It is an expansive study of Gurnah’s work and lays down foundations for a varied study on the author. It approaches Gurnah’s fiction from multiple angles, and takes it beyond the postcolonial perspective into varied and vast arenas of literary theory.
Recent Books
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The Wind in a Seashell
2016
The Wind in a Seashell: Poetry; After the Pause Press
An introduction to the text by the author:
“A windy seashell/ Murmurs in the sand’s ears/ Slowly the secret”
After shoveling through my poetry to establish a title, reading and re-reading it in order to find a singular connection between the several poems, I found reflective links. These are the links that emerge when one reflects. They are the general small truths that are most common to me and somehow find their way into my poetry. These are like the links between the shifting rays of the sun (streaming in effortlessly) and the window. The window is an opening that allows sight and wind. It is visual, olfactory and kinesthetic. The window creates reflex, reaction, but also response. One can actually stand at the window and perceive. Sensation is the first effect but perception is a leap that comes thereafter when one has been standing there for some time. The window and the sun are not static and are forever changing. They have a history and future. They both look on and what they look on changes. The shifting and the waning face of a setting sun collaborates with the dark and hidden concreteness of an inward night that readily allows penetration but allows expression to come only in a veiled or camouflaged form. This book’s poetry is a chameleon of sorts—a multi-pigmented being, a cold hibernating organism, clinging to wood and leaf till it is itself no more and changes—a geo-morph and climato-morph. Biology and geography come synched through paint and pigment.
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