Description
The poems in this anthology originated from ‘Poetry Live’ — a curated experience on social media platform, Instagram, where poetry readings were led by the Indian Novels Collective and Mumbai’s much-loved bookstore Kitab Khana. Poet and critic Arundhathi Subramaniam, who inaugurated the series on 31 March 2020 with a reading of The Tent by Rumi, described the initiative as, “an act of faith in poetry in troubling times”. Given this background, it was natural for poets in the anthology to shine through this ‘immaculate choreography’ in verse — miracles and mirages of poetry waiting to happen, now and in the future.
This joyously diverse collection is both celebration and resistance. It is testament to fellowship at a time of transition and disquiet, a commitment to stay connected—across the divides of culture, geography and language—and a tribute to lives lost but not forgotten. — Arundhathi Subramaniam
Rivers Going Home is a veritable museum of contemporary poetry in its varied themes, tones, and textures. Its range is immense and the topics diverse, from desire to death, from nature to politics, and so are the genres present here —satires, lyrical statements, imagistic verses, conversations with oneself and others, frank expressions of sexual freedom… a pleasure to read indeed. — K. Satchidanandan
Profound, sublime, radiant with light, Rivers Going Home moves as a river moves through the currents of our lives, with poems that fall the way the rain brings news of a green world to come. They call for someone, finally, to write “the history of flowers,” even if the “pulsating green rooms/ of the world/ lie plunged in darkness.” — Brian Turner
Poet, author, literary curator and professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai), Ashwani Kumar is the co-founder of Indian Novels Collective. His major anthologies are My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter and Banaras and the Other. Widely anthologized, his poems have been translated for a special volume Architecture of Alphabets in Hungarian. He is also the author of Community Warriors and one of the chief editors of Global Civil Society at London School of Economics. He writes a regular book column in the Financial Express.
A short backgrounder
Rivers Going Home, published by Red River, is a collaborative poetry project between India Novels Collective and Kitab Khana and it is dedicated to the memory of Manglesh Dabral who passed away on 9 December 2020 due to covid complications. The poems in this anthology originated from ‘Poetry Live’— a curated experience on social media platform, Instagram, where poetry readings were led by the Indian Novels Collective and Mumbai’s much-loved bookstore Kitab Khana from 31 March -14 April 2020. As the time passes on, the poems in the anthology have acquired a much larger vision of poetry- an overarching ecological and feminist way of seeing the world and using metaphors of rivers- water, to seep deep into the earth, and into our bodies, into our memories.
Rivers Going Home has received endorsements from renowned international poets, such as Brian Turner, K. Satchidanandan, and Arundhathi Subramaniam. 30 translators in the volume include names like Jayanta Mahapatra, K. Satchidanandan, Anamika, Sudeep Sen, Asad Zaidi, Mustansir Dalvi, Sarbjeet Garcha, Anjali Purohit, Aparna Anekvarna, Rabindra Swain, Ramu Ramanathan, Hemang Desai, among other
Rivers Going Home, 71 poets in solidarity from 15 Indian languages, include both renowned poets such as K. Satchidanandan, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Basudev Sunani, Menka Shivdasani, Anju Makhija, Prabodh Parikh, Vinita Agrawal, Subodh Sarkar, Sukrita Paul Kumar, Savita Singh, Mani Rao, Melvyn Rodrigues, Manohar Shetty, Anna Sujatha Mathai, AJ Thomas, as well as many leading younger generation poets like Rochelle Potkar, Anuradha Singh, Saima Afreen, Sonnet Mondal, Smita Sahay, Suhit Kelkar, Durga Panda and Sarabjeet Garcha, who shared their original and recent works along with, celebrated poet-actor and dastango Danish Husain, leading US poet Brian Turner, and Indian diaspora poet Robert Wood from Australia. 30 translators in the volume include top names like Jayanta Mahapatra, K. Satchidanandan, Anamika, Sudeep Sen, Asad Zaidi, Mustansir Dalvi, Sarbjeet Garcha, Anjali Purohit, Aparna Anekvarna, Rabindra Swain, Ramu Ramnathan, Hemang Desai among others.
The cover page of the book is a painting by eminent Urdu poet Jayant Parmar.