By Santosh Bakaya
One of the poems in the book also transported me to the iconic filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice. (Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice, p. 56). It was while my daughter was doing a Film Appreciation Course, that I also happened to see all of Tarkovsky’s films along with her.
By Goirick B
To our rage then, our defiance,
We must lose. We must lose.
Rejoice this inability.
By Anupama Mohan
Life is a concatenation of habits:
He watches, I forget; he notes, I write;
he scratches the surface of things; I assemble the scab.
At least, the cat, I hope, is grateful.
By Kamalini Natesan
The child runs,
Abandoning home,
Want more, says he.
It hurts, I bleed,
Askance – why me?
By Goirick Brahmachari
That many of them drove me away
When I tried to be a socialist
For I was not from JU or JNU or NYU.
By Goirick B
They are taking me away
from the banks of my Chatla
They are taking me away.
By Sunil Sharma
in order to have a sense of the totality,
we must tumble down a rabbit’s hole or
enter a Looking-glass room on our own
‘cause there is always that side calling out
an adventurer to explore!
By Manmeet Narang
There is a child-like spirit in the poet. There is a trail of innocence, an irrepressible hope and the ability to see wonder even in the mundane. Like when he describes sharing a glass of milk with a cow herder’s son.
By Jyotsna Dwivedi
Here are those daughters of mine, who were slaughtered, raped, killed in the womb.
Here are those daughters, who live in fear. Here are those daughters who live in shame.
By Ananya S Guha
I cup palms, fold hands
into a prayer of hope,
that these hills do not turn bestial
or run away with my trifling, opaque
dreams of a town which my eyes
search every day, for change
By Amrita Mukherjee
The poems in Rhythms in Solitude are exactly that. It could be written about a far-flung place you have never been to, about a temptress you have never seen or about a love that you have never experienced, but you feel like you are there sitting next to the author as he sees a drop of dew dislodge itself from the leaves of a tree, as he experiences the flurry in his heart when he writes about falling in love for the first time.
By Fatima Zehra
nevertheless I found peace in
your lewd reciprocity and
tragic seasonal violence,
your trapped sunset hues;
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 