Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Her latest (third) collection of poems is Inhabiting (Authorspress, 2022) that closely follows Stitching a Home (Red River, 2021) and Moon in My Teacup (Writer’s Workshop, 2019). Her latest poetry is featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers’ Platform, The Woman Inc., Madras Courier, Berfrois, Yearbook of Indian English Poetry 2020-2021, The Aleph Review, and Setu among others. Drawn to feminist and ecological ideas, she loves, rebels, writes and reviews from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India.

 

Committed to an undying affair with words, Basudhara finds in poetry an epistemological and existential skylight. She writes because she feels she must test words on her tongue, pulse, moods, agitation, abstraction and satire. She is convinced that words can change the world and hence, she works at them in her own culinary way - washing, peeling, grating, pounding, baking, sauteing, kneading, roasting, often flaming them for what they might yield.

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While the fact of literary prose, she believes, can manage to travel to some extent in the wide world by word of mouth, poetry’s distinct truth can hardly be communicated without being formally heard or read. Poetry being a ghost, it must be spoken to in order to be able to speak. This need for the world to engage with poetry before it can actually engage with the world is, both, poetry’s greatest strength and weakness.

 

For poetry to be the extraordinary agent of beauty, empathy and healing in society that it potentially is, the world needs not only more poets writing but also, more readers willing to surrender to poetry's promise with an open heart.

 

Here is to creating, reading and sharing more poetry with the world!

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