Description

This book of poetry explores caprices of love, disillusionment, and migration from one city or country to the other. Some poems echo human folly and limitations and others reflect a human trials and tribulations in the face of extremes and utter despair. What pervades in common in all the poems is the lightness of departing from the nook and corner of pain and arriving at a consensual transitory juncture.

Exploratory and intimate, Pushpanjana’s poems often employ direct address and the observing eye of the second person to do their work. At the heart of each poem, there is an open question and a clearing which, while promising no answers, points us to a liminal place. — K Srilata

One feels these poems inside one’s mouth: the sky as cuisine, the mouth of a basin, a star falling on the tongue, chewing as knowledge … I like their taste. — Sumana Roy

Pushpanjana’s writing plays the best card when it comes to the art of poetic seduction, as the approach she has involves sensuous details of the so-called mundane realities from which she deftly churns out something more; paradoxically making the process delay the reader’s pleasure in climax. She touches everything – from grief and feline secret to everything that struggles for meaning – there is nothing in her poetry that is not tactile. This poetic act forges a place where reality dwells on the same plane with the unreal. This sheer action makes her poems depict the earthiest form of abstraction. — Aritra Sanyal

Born and raised in Kolkata and partially nurtured in Delhi, Pushpanjana Karmakar is a poet, fiction writer, and a corporate lawyer in Bangalore. She has contributed poems and short stories to magazines, including Indian Literature, The Poetry India: Enchanting Echoes, The Bombay Review, The Scarlet Review, The Sunflower Collective, Coldnoon, Poetry Potion, and others. One of her short stories has been published in the book Dry Tongues and Brave Hearts published by Red River. Excerpts from the manuscript of her novel, Memory in Motion were selected for reading at the Tata Literature Festival, 2022.

Reviews

Kabir Deb in theSpace.ink

We are formations of the minute moments of this very life. There is a time period and we find ourselves adhered to instances, emotions, words, faith, fights, hatred and love. Poetry transcends the confined boxes of regularity to take us away from the monochrome. How I Remember You is How the Page Flips by Pushpanjana Karmakar brews intimacy with her own living and our personal experiences by going beyond what we know as stereotype. The macro-element of our lives expands using the references residing on a micro level. Thus, the enormous sky speaks through a millipede or a rusty moon is cupped in the branches of a eucalyptus tree. The addition of micro-elements effectively keeps simplicity in the forefront. … It is not easy to confess what we do not want to think about. But, at the same time, we do want to release our thoughts to ease our mind. The poet in this volume confesses with a heart that’s evocative and dressed by sighs. She also exhibits her persona like a pelican: by becoming one with the metaphors and the flowing world like an ocean wave. It is quite provocative to think about wearing the colour of the cave since it asks the fear, exhaustion and ghouls to be her unique attire.