Description

Moumita Alam’s beautiful, intimate and exquisitely layered poems scream and sing to us in these dark times. — Meena Kandasamy

Moumita Alam’s book of love poems is an excavation into the minds of two or several lovers and after her first book of intense political poems, this soothes us a bit. She describes her love poems as the ‘contours of two mad lovers ending their search for a home’ which is a heartening thought. But, where is this ‘home’ that she seeks? — Ra Sh (Ravi Shanker N)

Moumita’s poems traverse the length and breadth of longing for love and lust, interrogating entanglements with hegemonic patriarchy, searching for a true home in a ‘man’s world’ and laying bare the overall heartbreak of the human condition. — Ather Zia

Moumita Alam’s poems will take the readers to a dream island where the eternal infatuated and innocent love of Laila and Majnu reaches its peak where Laila and Majnu are the same. Her women-centric poems bring you down to earth where the patriarchal family system has become a war-torn genocide, particularly for women and children. — Hema Latha

Feel the poetic explosion of Moumita Alam’s expression. Any explosion is a consequence of incredible suppression that pervades history. Moumita, both as an individual and a representative of her community, in gender, religion, language, class and territoriality, has been undergoing that historical suppression. — N Venugopal

In Poems at Daybreak, Moumita Alam erases boundaries — of place, time, and social mores — over and over again. She also challenges gender binaries through her voice, which, while being distinctly feminine finds a charming fluidity to enter the lover’s heart regardless of its he/she pronouns. — Bhaswati Ghosh

Moumita Alam is a poet and essayist from Jalpaiguri in North Bengal. Living in the periphery, both demographically and culturally, she is the voice of those whose voices don’t often reach the centre. Her first poetry collection, The Musings of the Dark was published in 2020, with nearly a hundred poems written in protest against the humanitarian crisis developing from the abrogation of article 370, the Delhi riots, and the Shaheen Bagh movement and the unbearable sufferings of the migrant labourers due to the unplanned Covid-induced lockdown. Her poems and articles are regularly published in Outlook, LiveWire (The Wire), Counter-Currents, Dhaka Tribune, Saraanga, etc. Her poem ‘I Am A Muslim Woman’ was translated into more than five languages, and the Malayalam translation of the poem was published in the Malayalam weekly Madhyamam. The Marathi translation of the poem was published in Marathi magazines Milun Saryajani and Prerok Lalkari. The Malayalam translation of her poem, ‘Call Me Resistance’ appeared in Deshabhimani. Her poems are also regularly translated into Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada. The Telugu translations of her poems are regularly published in the Telugu magazine Matruka. She is a contributor to the Yearbook of Indian English Poetry 2021, Yearbook of Indian English Poetry 2022 and the Amity Peace Poems published by Hawakal. She also writes for the Bengali daily newspaper Uttarbanga Sambad.