Three Poems
By Yuan Changming
Hesitantly, the snowflakes keep
Swinging around until their final fall
To the ground, in thickening stillness
Book Review: Harekrishna Deka’s ‘One Hundred Poems of Harekrishna Deka’
By Ananya S Guha
The poet’s professional life as a Police Officer in 20th century turbulent Assam is a backdrop against the unveiling of his poetry but there is no cause-effect mention. If he talks about blood, he presents the universal picture of man, trapped by history or anthropology.
In Conversation with Author, Nabanita Kanungo
By Rashida Murphy
I first encountered the work of Nabanita Kanungo, when she sent me a book of her poems to read and review in my capacity as Books Editor for Café Dissensus. I started reading the poems and finished them in one sitting; easy enough for a slim volume, you might think. Then I read them again. For several days, I read the poems that still haunt me for their frank exploration of the violence embodied in landscape and the way language is used to convey both ‘resistance and retrieval’.
Two poems
By Faakirah Irfan
Tell the parents stuck in hospital lines
That their children’s eyes are nothing but
Collateral damage.
Book Review: Dustin Pickering’s ‘Salt and Sorrow’
By Paromita Sengupta
Salt and Sorrow, like the other books of Dustin, is refreshing because it is, in some sense, old-school. Old school in the sense that it goes back to tackle fundamental questions about life and living, love and longing, truth and god.
Reflections on Chandramohan S’s poetry
By Aaron Sherraden
Ceiling fans hover above the lynched victims, draped with blue flags, an image of the Ambedkar Students’ Association banner that Rohith Vemula used to hang himself from the hostel ceiling fan at the University of Hyderabad.
Two Poems
By Kabir Deb
And now as I am beyond good and evil
I feel guilty of not being me
When I came from the womb
I dreamt of an identity that cannot be touched.
Two Poems on Kolkata
By Lopamudra Banerjee
She smells of half-baked meat, red rain and raw wounds.
She thinks of sporting a boyish haircut, her blazing breath
Slicing the air in shreds.
Book Review: Lopamudra Banerjee’s ‘Let The Night Sing’
By Wani Nazir
Lopamudra Banerjee’s recent book, Let the Night Sing, a bouquet of her poetic musings, without any hyperbole, belongs to the poetry that opens up even the shriveled and plugged channels of creativity in the reader. Opening the cover page of the book, the reader embarks on an odyssey with a longing that there be no end to it.
Poem: My Pond, Your Sea
By Gaurav J. Pathania
Years later,
I crossed the seven seas, to be here in your village by the sea,
Dipping my feet in the cool clear water
Feeling the thunderous waves crash onto my body.
Two poems
By Nishat Arif Hussaini
The clatter of steel from the next table
Knifes through the speech between us
I nod in assent, while your lips
Move in syllables severed from sound.
Book Review: Mallika Bhaumik’s ‘Echoes’
By Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario
I found this book powerful and brilliant. A few poems are like a flash flood. The words sweep the heart away. And some poems are like frost, conveying a profound sense of emptiness and void.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 