Book Review: Cross-Stitched Words by Chaitali Sengupta

Poet and Critic Gopal Lahiri reviews Chaitali Sengupta’s Cross-Stitched Words and calls her work akin to cross-stitching desire and longing.

• ISBN: 978-1-947403-17-8
• Published by: Setu Publications, Pittsburgh PA, (USA)

Poetry makes us feel certain emotions and think about things differently in our life or in the world or that make us laugh. In her impressive debut collection of poems, ‘Cross-Stitched Words’, Chaitali Sengupta explores the transformation of love and longing, apprehension, and emotions into poetic truth. Here is a poet who has her own distinctive voice and vision and her poems are grounded in deep thought and feeling. Her poems are more of a free speech rather than prose-poems, dispensing light and dark equally as they impart with candour and rhythm.

Showing what in retrospect seems like considerable restraints, her poems are like a memory of what it is like growing up.  come up like freedom as well as constraints and give us a through soaking. Her skilled engagement with the form continues to show the range and dexterity of her voice.

The Netherland-based poet writes in her Preface, ‘Cross-Stitched Words is my first collection of poetry in a prose-poem form, it is a culmination of years of scribbling my thoughts in journals, fed by life experiences. It mourns loss, celebrates Nature, and empowers the readers to seek solace in self-discovery and introspection, reminding them of their moments of personal significance.’