Description

These poems move the way rivers do — quiet, persistent, carrying whole histories in their flow. Abrona Aden writes with a quiet grace that glows with authenticity where the reader hears not just the mountains, the muting of a mother tongue, the ache of a disappearing homeland but also personal struggles that are the stuff of poetry. — Guru T Ladakhi

These poems are a journey through memory, change, and identity, written in blood-words that echo, and will continue to echo, across generations. Her poetry resists the erasure of self and history. — Dr Kevin MacNeil

These are the voices of truth, from a community no longer willing to be stereotyped as shy and softly spoken, a people determined to redefine mainland Indian literature — not from the margins, but from the heart. — Dr Mark Macleod

Abrona’s poetry is a meandering river. It moves from language to lights, plains to valley peaks, and from an astute quest for identity to a sense of abandon. She exists both in the global and the local with ease.  — Nabina Das

Abrona Aden’s poetic voice finds a quiet strength from the past. She captures the loss of time, space, language and people.  — Rimi Nath

The sensibilities at work here reveal a voice that is steady and unmistakably its own, and necessary for imagining identity beyond the narrow constructs the world so often tries to place around the individual. — Semeen Ali

Abrona Lee Pandi Aden is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Sikkim University, India. She belongs to the Lepcha community indigenous to Sikkim and Darjeeling hills. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Muse India, Mekong Review, Sapiens Anthropology Magazine, The Bangalore Review, among others. She is a recipient of the ICM Global South Translation Fellowship awarded by the Institute of Comparative Modernities, Cornell University, in 2022. She has been the Charles Wallace India Trust Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, during their Spring Term, 2024. She enjoys living in Kalimpong and Gangtok, surrounded by her family, friends, cousins, relatives, her people. Every time she sees the mighty Kongchen Konglo, she knows she is home.