On Sunday, 28th April, at 5:30 PM, the literary community of Pune will come together at Pagdandi Bookstore, located at Regent Plaza, Baner-Pashan in Pune, for the book launch of "Coins in Rivers." This collection of poems by Rochelle Potkar promises an exploration into themes as diverse as poetry, sensuality, satire, rhythm, love, war, politics, beinghood, and citizenry.
The event will be enriched by the presence of Rochelle Potkar, a multi-faceted artist celebrated for her work as a poet, author, and screenwriter. She will be in conversation with Siddharth Dasgupta, a noted poet, fiction writer, and cultural journalist.
THE BOOK:
'Coins in Rivers' is prize-winning poet Rochelle Potkar’s third book of poetry. This book was longlisted at the Eyewear Publishing, Beverly Prize Poetry Book Award UK 2019 and shortlisted at the 2nd Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize 2019, New York.
Across the Indian English poetry landscape Rochelle Potkar is a noted and acclaimed poet whose creative writings in fiction, prose and poetry won two prestigious international writing residencies - one the famed Iowa’s International Writing Program fellowship and the other the Charles Wallace India Trust Fund, University of Stirlintemhg, Scotland. The book is a landscape of poetic deliberations from the personal to the politics best summarized by the endorsers of this book – who in themselves are honored and celebrated world poets.
The book is a landscape of poetic thematic deliberations from the personal to the political. The themes covered in this book reflect existence and life itself, in all its splendour from love to sensuality, humour to grief to world politics. This book is a refracted spectrum of what it means to live in this world as witnessed and experienced by one woman-poet from a corner of Mumbai, looking at herself, the city, her country’s citizenry, and the world around her, but never without a poetic lyrical coalescing of wisdom and philosophy, sometimes rhetoric, sometimes prophetic never bereft of the zeitgeist of living.
Jayanta Mahapatra says Exceptional work, this. A haunting inventiveness runs through these poems. Rochelle Potkar's imagination is rich and carefully employed to her poetic purposes, sensitively met with through her concrete imagery and cosmopolitan vocabulary.
Philip Schultz (2008, Pulitzer Prize Winner) & Founder-Director, Writers Studio, New York, USA says These fierce, fearless new poems of Rochelle Potkar seem nothing less than a continent adrift, forging not only a new language, but a refuge from our present aesthetic dystopia. It’s impossible not to quote her: “The picture…hung in the left wing…/of our ancient heart museum” “Sisyphean stone…of many biases/stacked from centuries…” “Emancipation is white,/ grey skin dotted in shark bites." This uproar of consciousness is matched in intensity by the flow of images, the pain and joy of passionate thinking and feeling. Such a pleasure to be so persuasively disrupted by such “fire, fire in the mountain, in the sky”, by such “Sensitive glass/ changing temperaments...” By such vision...
Adam Aitken, Australian poet, Winner of the 2021 Patrick White Award says Exalted and visionary, Potkar brings neologism and the old word, especially dialect, into friction. These poems spark and spin with feminine energy and surreal thought, critical reflection, and restlessness. History is grounded in the demotic experience. Technology and science, and sexuality, provide a foundation, but this sensuous world, endangered, careens headlong into a post-everything future without losing touch with the more human and fragile aspects of the Ancient. This is dynamic risk-taking poetry.
THE AUTHOR:
Rochelle Potkar is a prize-winning poet, author, and screenwriter based in Mumbai. Author of ‘Four Degrees of Separation’, ‘Paper Asylum’ - shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020, and ‘Bombay Hangovers’ - a collection of 16 short stories. She recently co-curated the Glass House Poetry Festival, India. Alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015) and a Charles Wallace Writer’s fellow, the University of Stirling (2017), she has been invited for the fourth consecutive year as a creative-writing teacher for IWP programs.
