Category: Poetry
Publisher: Westland Books (forthcoming)
Rights: World rights available (excluding Indian subcontinent)
Cri(s)es 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 Kashmir and COVID, spread themselves over the expanses of 600-million-year-old islands of Langkawi and the magnificent Scottish mountains, plunge deep into depressive states of mind and delight in the lightness of spring rain and self-love. They channel the continuum of seasons, species, sentiments.
They 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 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. These poems come angry and dark, but also look for redemption.
The author: Soumya Mukerji