New Release
Angshuman Kar
Angshuman Kar is a poet, novelist, and translator. At present, he teaches English literature at The University of Burdwan and is the Director of the Centre for Australian Studies of the university. He is also the former Secretary of Sahitya Akademi (Eastern Region).
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The Lost Pendant
This unique collection presents English translations of Bengali poems focused on the Indian Partition. It shows that poetry, alongside oral histories and memoirs, serves as a form of historical record. Lost Pendant reflects a different aspect of history by highlighting both the factual and emotional dimensions of a painful event. Essentially, this book aims to reframe the history and repercussions of the Indian Partition through poetry.
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Kathryn Moris
Readings/Conferences
Praise for Angshuman Kar
Pain, irony, paradox, and surprise are the major elements that constitute Angshuman’s poetry. His complex vision of human existence with its unresolved contradictions is evident in his poetic stances like where he thinks that a hole in a tree, which is really a wound becomes a shelter for birds and beasts or, toys are humans for children while humans are toys for grown-ups, or again, the history of this world is the history of the sorrows of mothers. Angshuman is playfully philosophical and philosophically playful in his poems collected in ‘Wound is the Shelter’ whose very title opens a door to his perceptive poetry.
K. Satchidanandan
Angshuman’s poetry opens up a space to witness and reflect on human experience, evoking the political, personal and cultural memory, resilience and hope.
Mamang Dai
There is a lively, versatile intelligence at work in Kar’s poems, a capacity to wonder as well as critique, to observe as well as grieve….Beneath the wealth of detail, there are imperceptible shifts and movements in tone. And so, in ‘Television,’ what seems like a self-ironizing history of a family’s TV brands spins gently into a poem about love and loss. It is this unobtrusive weave of sharp insight, wry humour and sudden gentleness that makes one inclined to revisit Kar’s poems.
Arundhati Subramaniam
Fusing surreal linguistic landscapes with fractured geographies of memory, Angshuman Kar is unmistakably one of the major voices of contemporary Indian poetry. Working through sharp modernist experimentation, and imagistic gestures, often marked by intellectual brilliance and political urgency, his verses thrive on primitive vulnerabilities and liminal rootedness, where cosmopolitan spaces become haunting metaphors for estrangement and dislocation, yet they discover strange, enduring beauty in these evanescent, tremulous moments in Bengal and elsewhere.
Ashwani Kumar
Upcoming Book
Of late, consistent publication of books on Bengali, Tamil, Odia, Malayali diaspora both in the vernacular languages and in English prove that many Indian diasporians, like Jhumpa Lahiri, are celebrating their regional, ethnic and linguistic identities through different cultural representations in diaspora while accepting the transnational character of their everyday living experiences. The transregional diasporas are, in fact, a prime example of the intersectionality that Avtar Brah identifies as a key feature of contemporary diaspora. This book attempts to assess the current trajectory of Indian diasporic literature and culture vis-à-vis a new concept of transregionalism.