A Blur of A Woman – Basudhara Roy

Basudhara Roy’s poems seek to make their home in the precarious tension between the generic and the particular. There is the fire of rage and resistance here, and yet, the impulse to incline toward broad statement is inflected by detail — the ‘tremor of bones’, ‘the air’s soiled chemise’, the breeze ‘starched with the smell of fish’, diaries where ink elopes with the rain — which return us from proclamation to particularity. These poems explore spaces between the abstract and the tangible, between sea and land, between restless freedom and urgent imperatives of ‘dream, dishwater, book, bread’. — Arundhathi Subramaniam 

 

Basudhara Roy’s finely etched and deeply considered poems examine the multiple complexities of women’s lives. Her unblinking gaze takes in everything from “children husband parents poetry plants/ cell phone laptop camera music Zumba obesity thyroid diabetes…” to the girl who keeps “calmly sewing her eyelids together” because “ever since they shoved a rod/ up her vagina she’s been afraid of openings”. Basudhara’s woman silently defends her “one foothold of land” and makes sure that wherever she stands, she owns the place. The quiet assertions of these poems are intense and multi-layered, and there is as much strength in her silences as there is in her words. Basudhara’s ability to weave metaphors and extract every strand of meaning from them is also impressive. These poems are powerful — fierce, tender, honest and contemplative — a collection that will make a valuable addition to any bookshelf. — Menka Shivdasani, Co-Chair, Asia-Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT) 

 

Basudhara Roy (b 1986) teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Creatively and academically drawn to themes of gender, mythology and ecology, her five published books include a monograph and three collections of poems — Moon in My Teacup (2019), Stitching a Home (2021), and Inhabiting (2022). Her work has featured widely in anthologies and magazines, including Chandrabhaga, The Punch Magazine, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing, The Dhaka Tribune, EPW, and Madras Courier, among others. Co-editor of two poetry anthologies and a firm believer in the therapeutic power of verse, she writes, reviews, and sporadically curates and translates poetry from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India.