Books

The alphabet of aliens (prose poems)

The dream like, eerily atmospheric prose poems in this collection interrogate borders and margins, extremities and intersections of migrancy – it is at once an autobiography and a meditation, a self-critique and a celebration. Here, the in-between ness and hybridity of the form is used not as an implement of subversion (of metre, lineation or tradition) but more like a medium, an ocular device pointed at space and stars, forests and rivers, rupture and belonging, baguette and potato. The mood is playful, the overall tone deliberately hyper-tactical (even whimsical) as it employs a variety of strategies (pun, repetition, mishearing and received vernaculars) to estrange language and sound while framing discourses on race, colour and causation. Some of these poems voice multi-interpretive narratives of migrant diasporas in all their plurality by (counter-intuitively) couching conflicts and wounds in lighthearted whimsy.The constantly morphing, fantastical, often magically real poems capture the unrelenting, anxiety-prone in-betweenness of people from elsewhere in all their complexities making this collection, written over twenty years, at once a hymn, an ode and an elegy.(Mawenzi House).

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Hands Like Trees (Stories)

An act of passion reverberates across continents when Visma Sen, a retired army officer, decides to remain in Calcutta when his family migrates to Canada. Sabyasachi Nag evokes the rising heat of Calcutta in the early morning as masterfully as he depicts the calmness of a snow-lit evening street in Brampton, Ontario while the entangled lives of the Sens of Shulut unfurl over three decades. Each linked story is told through the voice of a different member of the Sen family, from Nilroy’s movingly excruciating first day as caregiver to Aunt Rita with dementia to Milli’s ambition to host her guru Mata G. The experiences of each character draw a portrait of the Sen family, whose wounds drive them to pursue an ever-elusive happiness, while clearly yearning for identity and belonging. (Ronsdale Press).

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Uncharted (Poems)

Moving through geographies; through everyday bric-a-brac; through apparitions inherited and invented; through matters of flesh and make-believe this collection weaves portraits of violence, despair and bewilderment, generating a range of new relationships and meaning. Informed equally by circumstances of race, history and politics, each poem in the collection attempts to push language by playfully re-examining the old or by making new metaphors borne from narratives that are sometimes moral, religious, political and metaphysical. Uncharted is an urgent response to a world in conflict.(Mansfield Press)