Description

In this his third collection of poetry, writer Siddharth Dasgupta goes about gathering addresses and intimacies. All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart is an opera of the streets and their fluctuating enigmas. Variously, the collection dances into photographic memory, the pull of desire, and the cherished bouquets of home. You’ll encounter Shashi Kapoor, Brigitte Bardot, and Nina Simone. You’ll unravel the golden shovel, birthed from words by Carver, Proust, Seth, and such. You’ll swim in the slipstream of rebellious ghazal arrangements. And in the end, perhaps you’ll be reminded of your own streets—those places where joy was rife and where, concurrently, sadness lingered like a misplaced Sufi.

Siddharth Dasgupta’s All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart is a shimmering, accomplished 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, Poona, Bombay, Istanbul, Paris, Isfahan, and Lucknow. The ‘by heart’ of Dasgupta’s title suggests both the practice of memorising and the synapse of intimacy. What unifies this collection is love: for people, places, periods; in varied tonalities; on a spectrum from consummated to unrequited. As a corollary, these poems remind us that we must not merely survive, but flourish in the brief time we have—“The world dances in leftover light.” If All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart takes the fashioning of a lyric writerly self as its key project, it is equally committed to retrieving the pulsing viscerality of experience from time’s inexorable flux. — Ranjit Hoskote, award-winning poet, cultural commentator, curator, and author of the upcoming Icelight

Siddharth’s poems do what I enjoy most about poetry—render the normal, the everyday, the quotidian, strange and unfamiliar, helping us see them in a new light. How god can be found in a bakery, for example, or how “maybe the best days are an abandonment of the special.” We are invited to wander through these lines, and are startled always by a new way of seeing, by a detail, by a line, or many, that remain. “I watch a horizon removed,” he says in one poem, and you are left to imagine, what that might entail. A world anew. This is what these poems do. — Janice Pariat, celebrated novelist, poet, and author of the upcoming Everything the Light Touches

Siddharth Dasgupta writes poetry & fiction from lost hometowns, cafés dappled in morning light, and cities inflicted with an existential throb. His literature dances with the ethnicities of desire, coursing through verse, fiction narratives, and that strange, compelling somewhere in between. Siddharth’s books include Letters From an Indian Summer (Fingerprint), The Sacred Sorrow of Sparrows (Niyogi), and A Moveable East (Red River). All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart is his fifth book, and third volume of poetry. His words appear in literary journals across the world, while he has read in places like Mandalay, Bombay, Galle, Lucknow, Paris, Dubai, and Istanbul. Occasionally, Siddharth explores fragments of travel and culture for a smattering of publications. He serves as Editor, Visual Narratives with The Bombay Literary Magazine, but has always known the swirling nostalgias of the city of Poona to be home.

You’ll find the author on Instagram @citizen.bliss

http://citizenbliss.squarespace.com