Description

The body is the world:/ God plays on our bodies/ as he does upon the world’s// I play upon my lover’s body

This new volume — the Essential Hoshang Merchant — distils more than 50 years of the maverick poet’s work from 1973 to 2025, and for the first time brings together a judicious selection from each of Merchant’s individual published collections, representing the life and times of a queer icon and one of India’s best living poets.

This edition has been edited by Tuhin Bhowal.

Definitely a major poet still at the very top of his game. — Vivek Narayanan, author of After

Merchant’s poetry is the fountainhead from which so much has emerged that it will take us generations to reckon with its true strength, vigour and transformativeness. — Akhil Katyal, author of The Last Time I Saw You

Hoshang Merchant is a poet of thirty years standing with twenty-five books of poetry. His papers are archived at the Koch Library, Cornell University. He taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Hyderabad for twenty-eight years. He was awarded the Rainbow Warrior Award for his life’s work in 2019.

          Reviews

Kabir Deb in his Substack

These poems are important because they keep a collapsing society from dissolving entirely into dust. They preserve memory when institutions erase it, nurture hope when despair becomes ordinary, and transform private whispers into the collective cries of a restless conscience. They remind us that poetry is not merely an aesthetic exercise but a living archive of resistance, compassion, and human dignity. Even when such verses are read aloud, however, they often carry an unsettling incompleteness, not because they have failed, but because the world has yet to fully listen. The poets may have spoken with all the honesty they possess, but the poems continue to wait for their true readers, for the moment when they cease to be confined to books and gatherings and become part of the air we breathe.