Bracing Warmth

Author: Rupsa Banerjee

Publisher: Veer Books (2021)

"Rupsa Banerjee’s music is so much her own: ‘Aloe-dabbed rash, light-stayed / nadir’, a dance of consonants released into resolving vowel. Her lines race through seemingly disconnected words and images, fleetingly evoking some cohering event or subject. These stanzas remember conventional form – ‘Recipe’ and ‘Sonnets on Places,’ arias on the genre. Histories of imperialism are implicit in many of these poems, tangentially. The subject here is how a ponderous past has borne down into our language, ‘unyielding words find themselves into trading / dictionaries.’ And then, so much more, above and beyond. Here are monsoons and markets and bhitti (the ‘foundation of logic and the bedrock of a house’) and family and persistent attention to language as life. Read, and mark.." 

—Nigel Wheale