Samriddhi Raj is a graduate of B. A. (Hons) English from the University of Delhi. She has previously published her work in the Criterion Journal.
Category Archive: Poets
Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh and educated in Germany and the United States, Ronny Noor is now an English professor at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, U.S.A. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The Toronto Review, Palo Alto Review, South Asian Review, Short Story, Taj Mahal Review, FreeXpresSion, The Weekend Independent, The Ghazal Page, The Daily Star, Kokako, and Contemporary Literary Review India. He is also the author of Snake Dance in Berlin (a novel), Slice of Heaven and Other Essays (a collection), and Where Heaven Spreads Wide & Other Stories (a collection).
By Gargi Vachaknavi
In the heydays of ABBA, there was a popular song called ‘Nina Pretty Ballerina’, which spoke of a girl who led an ordinary life but became the ‘queen of the dancing floor’ when she stepped into the role of a ‘pretty ballerina’. Sarita Jenamani is a bit like that. She works as a marketing manager in Austria but turns into a lyrical whiplash when she picks up her pen to write poetry.
Sarita Jenamani, with a background of economics and management studies in India and Austria, is a poet, a literary translator, anthologist, editor of a bilingual magazine for migrant literature – Words & Worlds – a human rights activist, a feminist and general secretary of PEN International’s Austrian chapter in the literary world.
Perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of her personality is her poetry that has so far been published in three collections, the latest being Till the Next Wave Comes. English is the chief medium of her creative process. The other two languages she writes in are, Odia, the state language of the place of her origin Odisha (India), and German, the language of her country of residence, Austria. She uses these languages for translation projects that she undertakes from time to time. Sarita translated Rose Ausländer, a leading Austrian poet, and an anthology of contemporary Austrian Poetry from German into Hindi and Odia. She has received many literary fellowships in Germany and in Austria including those of the prestigious organisations of “Heinrich Böll Foundation” and “Künstlerdorf Schöppingen”. In this exclusive, she talks of how poetry empowers her to find her individuality and address social issues, of how being in PEN has taught her that thought stretches beyond all borders and of a past and present that shuttles between varied cultures.
What moved your muse? When and how did you start writing?
Actually, I did not want to be a poet rather poetry, as Neruda once said, arrived in search of me. All my joys, sufferings, passions, and memories that significantly leave deep impact on me, turn into ash, sink into my being and again rise like a phoenix in the lines. This provides me the pleasure of seeking an enigmatic truth in some ancient temple. Such feelings compel me to write poetry. Poetry for me is an act of introspection, self-realisation and a sanctuary.
Fatima Ijaz, is currently teaching English and Speech Communication at Institute of Business Administration, Karachi. She is an English graduate from Hartwick College, N.Y and York University, Toronto. She also holds a Master in English Linguistics from Eastern Michigan University. She won first prize at the Mclaughlin Poetry Contest in Toronto, 2007. Her work was featured in a poetry and art collaboration for #NomeansNo at the Music Mela, Islamabad’18 and at Art Baithak, Karachi University in March 2019. Her work has been published in Zau, Red Fez, Rigorous, The Write Launch, Abramelin, Della Donna, Whirlwind, These Fragile Lilacs, Writer’s Asylum and Praxis magazine.
Reviewed by Rakhi Dalal
Title: Out of Syllabus
Author: Sumana Roy
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books, 2019
Sumana Roy is a poet, novelist and essayist. She has authored three books including How I Became a Tree (memoir/non-fiction), Missing (fiction) and Out of Syllabus (poetry). Recently, she has edited a story collection called Animalia Indica. Her work has appeared in various prestigious literary magazines, newspapers and journals. She teaches at Ashoka University as Associate Professor, Creative Writing.
Out of Syllabus has 35 poems. These are categorized under different sections in different fields of study like mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry and so on. At first glance, a reader might wonder about the ordering of sections but as Sumana says:
“..the essence of the poetic— the poet must hide, the reader must look for the hidden. And that a poem is often not about what one began meaning or imagining it to be.”
———– Life in Stanzas, Open Magazine.
The reader must find a meaning for herself.
Title: Till The Next Wave Comes
Author: Sarita Jenamani
Publisher: Dhauli Books
Links: Amazon
Viennese Coffee-houses
No sooner does dusk fall
than the city’s cafés come to life
with the tinkling clang of indifference
Gradually the crowd of solitude gathers
around the tables
Hamsini Hariharan is a podcaster, and foreign policy researcher. She has been writing since she was six years old. Hamsini believes that the personal is political and her poems often reflect the intersection of both spaces. She is currently based in China.
Sandeep Kumar Mishra is an outsider artist, poet and lecturer in English Literature. He has edited a collection of poems by various poets — Pearls (2002) and written a professional guide book — How to be (2016) and a collection of poems and art — Feel My Heart (2016).
Website – https://www.sandeepkumarmishra.com/
Blog- https://sandeepmishra551974.wordpress.com/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/sandeep551974
Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/sandeep551974
Introduced and translated by Pallavi Narayan
Jonathan Urqueta was born on 18 September 1991 in the Colchagua Valley, Chile. He was raised in Marchigüe, a huaso (country) village in the central region of Chile, where he learned the names of trees, got to know birds by their song, and had a hard and, at the same time fragrant, childhood soaked in criollismo (Creole). From the age of eleven he started travelling in Chile, from the south to the north, and passed through many transversal valleys, resting in some of them for a couple of years. He owes his survival to a couple of occupations that he learnt on his path. Today he works and lives in Vicuña, a town in Elqui Valley, caught in the eternal sun of the Norte Chico (small north). Always captivated by folklore and natural landscapes, regionalism and social questions, he has been writing since the age of fourteen. Urqueta has been working on publishing his poetry for the last couple of years.
As a researcher on contemporary translated texts, I was invited to participate in a prestigious two-week summer school on challenges of translation in July 2019, organised at the Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile. With my prior knowledge of Spanish and interest of many years in South American literature, this workshop gave me the perfect opportunity to delve into the beauty and strife of producing and examining translated poetry and fiction, in the esteemed company of some of the foremost, and emerging, translation studies academics and translators across continents. This is the 40th year of Chile-Singapore relations, making this text a privilege for me to pen. Cultural and literary events to bring together Chileans and Singapore residents, and to discuss pertinent issues, are being organised through the year
By Tan Kaiyi
Poet. Photographer. Singer. Bearded botak (bald man). As an artiste, Marc can be best described as a living kaleidoscope. His creative work can be hard to pin down. So far, he has written and edited twelve books of poetry, the latest being Sightlines, a collection of poems and travel photography co-created with photographer Tsen-Waye Tay. He plays with a band, Neon and Wonder, and set numerous poems to music with his band mates. He is also active in Singapore’s poetry slam scene, and participates in regular sessions at Blu Jaz Cafe.
If that’s not all, he is passionate about photography and the principal photographer of Mackerel, an online culture magazine he founded. He also collaborated with well-known Singaporean satirical personality Mr Brown in an online video that made fun of a MasterChef judge who misunderstood the nature of chicken rendang. Responding to his criticism that the chicken was not crispy enough, the song playfully (shown in the video below) corrects the judge with an appropriate understanding of the Malay delicacy:
The lines sing out:
Hello, this is not KFC,
Rendang not supposed to be crispy.
If you don’t know what is Asian food,
Don’t tekan auntie on the TV.
