Book One is a work that wraps itself around your heart and grows to enwrap it with the quiet foliage of the despair and beauty of unresolved relationships, biographies, memories and death. Initially published in 1995 as a limited edition, Sharmistha Mohanty’s debut book has received a re-release in 2023 by Context. Despite nearly two decades since it was first published, such is Mohanty’s poetic vision that the book does not seem dated at all. In fact, read in the complexities that haunt our world today, where destruction, war, loneliness and urban isolation jostle for space alongside hyper visible opulence and apathy, the book brings out just what one feels on an everyday basis.
January 2025, volume 49, No 1