Description

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 been 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. https://www.basudhararoy.com/

Reviews

Malashri Lal in Borderless Journal

This collection is a subtle attack on patriarchy as it encompasses the history and socio-cultural conditions that have moulded women into being mercurial yet tangible, pliant as well as resistive, buoyant but also vulnerable. As the poems flow in a drumroll of many contexts, vignettes of the journey are captured, symbolically strong and offering a plethora of layered meanings. The lines encourage a dialogic exchange whether with the poet, or with one’s own half-acknowledged self that is suddenly confronted by Medusa’s mirror.

Tansy Troy in conversation with Basudhara Roy in Usawa Literary Review

“When I reflect on my (Jharkhandi-Bengali-Hindu) childhood, the one thing that I remember as common to all our households was the presence of an elaborate ‘pujoghor’ (worship room/worship corner) which no matter how tiny or cramped, was always marked by the visibility of an array of deities. Crowding the shelves would be photographs and paintings; terracotta, clay, stone, marble and brass figurines, as well as books and hand-written paper inscribed with mantras, totems, and astrological configurations representing a host of deities–human, animal, spirit, natural element and so on. If you cared to know, the household elders had a story about each of these gods and how their power came to be recognized and worshipped. In the cultural matrix that surrounded us, it was possible for anything and everything to be deified and there would be shells, cowries, leaves, flowers, grass, water, pieces of ribboned cloth, bangles, vermillion, turmeric, sandalwood, incense, fruits, sweets, vegetables, and currency happily jostling with each other and with surrounding divinities as divine. Under such conditions, it was very difficult to deny the sanctity of any object. As children, we made our way gently through such worship rooms/niches lest we should disturb or defile something and earn thereby the vengeful ire of some remote god. Today, there is an abject disappearance of that diverse culture of godhood. The upsurge of radicalism with its insistence on a monolithic version of religion and a rigid godhead has deprived us of the freedom and necessity of personal experiments in faith. To receive a religion without the right to explore the various dimensions of faith can, in my opinion, only be tremendously self-defeating.”

Anita Balakrishnan in The Book Review, Volume XLIX Number 8 August 2025

Basudhara Roy’s poetry is unflinching, imaginative and introspective, describing the trauma, turbulence, warmth and tenderness that can be part of woman’s life. Her poems bear witness to the power of a woman’s voice to engage emotionally with the readers while she interrogates the mystery of the feminine in an era of transformative social change.

Ajmira Khatun in EKL Review

It’s a journey of voice and silence. With each verse, Roy leads us through milestones of memory, resistance, longing, and truth. Her words don’t just speak — they burn, breathe, and bare.

Akanksha Pandey in PYSSUM LITERARIA

Basudhara Roy’s collection, visually captivating with its abstract and thought-provoking cover, instantly immerses the reader in a realm of intricate feelings and reflective journeys. The “blur” in the title suggests the fluid nature of identity, a concept mirrored throughout the chosen poems.

Shweta Rao Garg in the Bangalore Review

Basudhara Roy’s A Blur of a Woman: A collection of poems that brilliantly occupies the space between the self and the world. While responding to the question of whether women write “women’s poetry,” the English poet Jo Shapcott remarked that women’s poetry shows “a unique openness to the world and the body.” While some poets derive a unique perspective by anchoring the body and the self as concrete poetic objects, other poets make an effort to highlight the elusive nature of the two. Basudhara Roy’s fourth collection of poetry, A Blur of a Woman, does both – it re-creates the self and the body and wills their erasure. At the first glance, Roy’s poems are deeply steeped in the experiences of womanhood. After some careful reflection, one observes a desire to subvert and transcend subjecthood. A desire, perhaps, to morph into other identities, or be without identities that hoist onto the self.