Bookshelf
In this collection of poetry from across the multiple languages of South Asia in translation, Ashwani Kumar provides a context that is itself a meditation on poetry as liminal geography of human experience…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Dead bodies piling up, losing friends and relatives: Ashwani Kumar expresses his anguish but his poem is also about the longer history of hatred, the ideology of the rulers- a virus that devastates us.; his vision is dark, dystopian yet lyrical. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
(First published March 10 2020)
In this shape-shifting prose-poem of imagined conversations with Gandhi’s heteronyms, Ashwani Kumar riffs on Ashis Nandy’s essay on the four ‘Gandhis’ after Gandhi to meditate on life in this darkling plain…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
With an irreverence that interlaces several myths into a subversive vision of our entangled lives, Ashwani Kumar serves up his unique brand of ‘mythical realism.’ …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
A real meeting with a microbiologist in a Brighton coffee shop offers poet Ashwani Kumar an occasion to fantasize a dense and complex reality…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Diving into the imaginary of poetry, the “interiors of alphabets” Ashwani Kumar searches for the character that could have written those mythic-realist poems about Banaras and the Other and discovers they are his heteronyms. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Ashwani Kumar’s “Banaras and the Other” is a series of excursions to that enchanted confluence of fable and reality, the concrete and the ineffable; the outcome is a new poetics of mythic realism. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Time was when we stood in long lines in order to live: that was bad enough, but today we have to wait in longer lines in order to die… we also have to wait in line to be cremated or buried, three to a pyre or grave. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Hungarian poet musician and writer Gábor Lanczkor dwells in verse on what it means to be between two cultures for an artist in these poetic vignettes about the life of painter Amrita Sher-Gil mirrored through different voices…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Never before has India witnessed such an “Organization of Hatreds” targeting minorities and the questioning, disobedient mind. Writers across languages and genres appeal for change. …[Read More]…