By Bilquis Zafirul Hassan. Edited by Naghma Zafir and Deeba Zafir

The poem ‘Will You be My Friend?’ gives a refreshingly novel articulation to women’s anger by exposing the asymmetrical power equation between husband and wife, where the wife is forced to tolerate his scorn, condescension, infidelities and so much more. The wife reminds the husband that being the ‘better half’, she won’t ‘stoop’ to pay back in the same coin. She then moves on to invite him to be her friend:


Reviewed by: Nishat Zaidi
Translated from the original Punjabi with an introduction by Neeti Singh

It lends the book a very dramatic kickstart. Mixing registers of hagiography, history and biography in one torrent of possessive emotion, the writer-translator steps into the inner recesses of Peero, creating in the process her own ‘Peero’. In the subsequent formal extended ‘Introduction’, Peero is heralded as the first Punjabi woman poet, a title which, for the time being, may hold. Still, if the maturity of her verses is any yardstick, it is difficult to believe that she did not have able, wo


Reviewed by: Akshaya Kumar
By Satya Mohanty

The books that came my way this time have filled me with a sense of hope that Indian poetry in English continues to ask difficult questions and has been able to resist the silencing of voices that one increasingly witnesses. It is not easy to write in an environment where one begins to feel stifled; and maybe it is in such moments in history that poets have emerged with renewed urgency. The collections included in this combined review range from coming down hard on rigid ideas to entering a world of nostalgia and softness, from confronting the forces that threaten to unmake us as a people, to grappling with issues of identity and one’s place in the larger world.


Reviewed by: Semeen Ali
By K. Hanumantha Reddy. Translated from the original Telugu by the author

‘A Few Announcements!’ brings out the agony, anger and will power of the insulted and the humiliated to struggle for freedom. They seek no mercy. ‘We are untamed horses with iron jaws and wings. We submit to no reins. We fly away with caves and sell them to the man of old goods… Many will come to our songs, enraptured by our battles against the adversities that won’t let us speak for ourselves, eat our food, or shake our hands with ourselves’ (p. 52).


Reviewed by: J Ravindranath
By Kiran Desai

Indeed, the consistency with which the novel enwraps us in the mist of its world lies, paradoxically, in its very inconsistency. Not all sentences march to the same rhythm; paragraphs and thoughts wander, and characters do not inevitably resolve along expected trajectories. Yet everyone, in their varied way, carries a shimmering knowledge of life; everyone is granted something sharp, something infused with mysticism, to say. A melancholic patriarch, Manav, touches upon the core of the matter when he advises Sunny to abandon the certainties of the West and go straight to the mystics to understand ‘who you should have become instead of the person that you are’


Reviewed by: Nikhil Kumar
By Carlos Tamilavan. Translated from the original Tamil by Gita Rajan Thornbird,

That said, almost all the Indian characters in the novel are given supernatural powers at some point in their narrative lives. Chandran’s mother is said to have possessed the power to detect fire accidents until she was twelve. Vijaya takes Chandran to a cave and performs an occult sexual ritual that helps her conceive a child. A Polish character Chandran dreams up in vivid detail gives him hitherto unknown information about Lydia’s brother. It is the casual indifference of these characters to all these incredible events that makes the novel truly magical realist.


Reviewed by: Ramakrishnan V