Description

The draw of elsewhere skies, harbouring the mythologies and hopes and betrayals of our elsewhere lives. Lived across four distinct sections and fifty-two poems that dip often into the enigmas of Poorna, Paris, Calcutta, Isfahan, Bombay, Istanbul, and such, Cape Elsewhere is a love letter to the fragility and beauty of human beings; to the streets and the empires we know as home. To be read slowly, beneath the sapphire of elsewhere nights.

“Cape Elsewhere is a lyrical atlas of memory, movement, and longing; a poetic voyage across cities and centuries. Epic and intimate, these poems trace the ghost-maps of migration, the quiet footsteps of lives lived in transit, evoking the everywhere and nowhere we carry within us.” — Tishani Doshi, Dancer, mentor, and award-winning writer of Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods; Small Days and Nights

“Siddharth Dasgupta’s wistful poems in this volume take a bird’s eye view of what makes the world go around—sorrows and triumphs, yearning and intimacies. Paris or Isfahan, Mumbai or Calcutta, places come alive in these poems complete with their own characteristic details, but the poems have a geography of their own shaped by a restive imagination. There’s never a dull moment on this trip with Dasgupta.” — Mani Rao, Author of thirteen poetry books, including So That You Know and four books in translation, including the Bhagavad Gita

Praise for Siddharth Dasgupta’s other works

“A collection of poems that weaves in and out of cityscapes, the worlds of jazz, blues, and the movies, segueing from taut emotion to pensive reflection to playful self-irony. These poems are rich in the kind of detail that only an awareness of plural pasts and multiple presents can impart: the landmarks of a neighbourhood, tenderly enumerated like sacred names in a chant; words drawn from Urdu and colloquial Bombay Hindi, which bring their spice with them; the beloved yet always mysterious geographies of cities that are close to the poet’s heart.” — Ranjit Hoskote, Celebrated poet, cultural commentator, curator, and author of Jonahwhale; Hunchprose; Icelight; The Homeland’s An Ocean

Siddharth Dasgupta’s journeys, meanderings, and intermittent seasons of stillness have, thus far, led to six books of poetry, fiction, and that strange, wild ocean in between. His books have been shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize, the Oxford Bookstore Prize, and others. He is a Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Siddharth’s literature has appeared in journals around the world, while he has read in cities as disparate as Bombay, Mandalay, Poona, Galle, Lucknow, Isfahan, and Paris. Aside from his literary writing, Siddharth also articulates the arts, culture, luxury, and longing for a few scattered publications. He calls the city of Poona home, where he is most at home in the convivial bustle of a favoured Irani café. You’ll find the writer on Instagram @citizen.bliss