Contemporary Poetry

This article examines Susheel Kumar Sharma's poetry collection Unwinding Self: A Collection of Poems (2020) as a profound exploration of existential dilemma within the context of postcolonial identity fragmentation and ecological crisis. Sharma's work navigates the fractured self-arising from a hybrid cultural heritage-Indian spiritual roots intertwined with Western education-amidst the pressures of modernity and technology. Drawing parallels with modernist poets like T.S. Eliot and Nissim Ezekiel, the analysis highlights Sharma's "micro-concrete moments" expanding into "macro-cosmic experiences," critiquing anthropogenic environmental degradation and spiritual desiccation. While Sharma seeks solace in nature and tradition, he remains ambivalent, unable to fully embrace the salvific potential of myth or religion as Eliot might have, reflecting the post-human condition. His poetry emerges as a modernist intervention intersecting postcolonial and ecological thought, questioning the poet's role in a world of mechanical reproduction and searching for authentic selfhood amidst pervasive rootlessness.

O Μαχμούντ Νταρουίς (1941-2008) θεωρείται ο εθνικός ποιητής των Παλαιστινίων και γενικότερα ένας από τους σημαντικότερους σύγχρονους Άραβες ποιητές. Το ποίημα «Σ’ αυτή τη γη», ένα από τα γνωστότερα του Νταρουίς, πρωτοδημοσιευμένο το 1986, αποτελεί εμφατική κατάφαση της ζωής, της ομορφιάς και της προσήλωσης στη μητέρα πατρίδα (την Παλαιστίνη ή όποια άλλη), την οποία υμνεί αποφεύγοντας την απλουστευτική προπαγάνδα. Η μετάφραση βασίστηκε σε διάφορες αγγλικές αποδόσεις του ποιήματος.

This article situates Zeina Hashem Beck's ghazals within the category of world poetry, aiming to avoid hegemonic notions of this category as much as possible. The ghazal is a form of lyric that originates as a mode in seventh-century Arabic poetry. Definitions depend on the historical period and linguistic tradition of its performance. Key moments of the form's migration include tenth-century adaptations to Persian and Urdu, as well as late eighteenth-century popularization in European languages. A translation project led by Aijaz Ahmad engendered a revival in English in the late twentieth century. However, many North American poets wrote free-verse versions criticized vehemently by Agha Shahid Ali in the introduction to his anthology Ravishing DisUnities (2000). Through the lens of historical poetics, this article argues that Hashem Beck draws on various stages in the ghazal's legacy for her own unique translingual iterations. Schooling in Lebanon and co-hosting of the podcast Maqsooda account for her indebtedness to Arabic poetry, yet she pays tribute to Shahid's anthology and writes anglophone ghazals that follow the rules upheld by the Kashmiri-American poet. Close readings of Hashem Beck's ghazals published to date identify translingual elements, as well as the ways in which motifs, such as love and exile lead to explicit localizations. The article thus demonstrates how Hashem Beck's ghazals combine influences from different phases in the form's development.

Díaz-Arcos, Patricia (2026). “Están aquí y allá: de paso, en ningún lado”. Exilios y tránsitos sin fin en un poema de Ida Vitale. En M. Colucciello, G. Nuzzo y M. Olivieri (eds.), Sujetos femeninos del desplazamiento (pp. 178-188). Madrid. Dykinson. ISBN: 979-13-7047-239-9. https://doi.org/10.14679/4939

Shriprakash Shukla's poem 'Uttar-Corona...' is not merely a poetic record of the experience of the pandemic; rather, it lays bare the deep fissures in contemporary civilisation that the coronavirus did not create but simply made visible. This poem stands as testimony to that historic moment when all of humanity's scientific achievements, political structures, economic systems and cultural certainties began to seem precarious in the face of a tiny biological entity. The pandemic did not merely infect bodies; it profoundly affected humanity's self-image, its sense of collectivity, its relationships and its understanding of freedom. That is why the question of 'Uttar-Corona' is not merely about the world after the pandemic but about the human being who, caught between fear, surveillance, control and solitude, is compelled to redefine his very existence.
This article presents a comprehensive and multifaceted re-reading of Shriprakash Shukla’s poignant Hindi poem “Uttar-Corona: Ātmāẽ hoṅgī, ātmiyatā na hogī!” (Uttar-Corona: Souls There Will Be, but No Intimacy!), composed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Written by Ravi Ranjan, the essay positions the poem not merely as a literary response to the global health crisis but as a profound prophetic meditation on the deeper civilisational fractures exposed by the pandemic. It argues that the virus did not create these fissures but rendered them starkly visible, compelling humanity to confront the erosion of intimacy, trust, and genuine human connection amidst rising regimes of surveillance, control, fear, and isolation. Through a rich tapestry of theoretical frameworks, the essay explores how the poem transforms a biological event into a philosophical, political, cultural, and existential inquiry into the future of human existence in a post-pandemic world.

At its core, the analysis centres on the poem’s haunting central declaration—“Ātmāẽ hoṅgī, ātmiyatā na hogī”—which encapsulates the central tragedy of contemporary civilisation: bodies and souls may persist, but the warmth of intimacy, closeness, and emotional solidarity will diminish. The essay begins by situating the poem within the lens of bio-politics, drawing on the ideas of life’s management and the regulation of bodies, behaviours, and relationships under the guise of health and security. It then proceeds through an extensive postmodern reading, highlighting the collapse of grand narratives of science, religion, progress, and human centrality, the fragmentation of meaning, and the blurring of reality and simulation in a media-saturated age. An existentialist interpretation follows, emphasising themes of absurdity, authentic versus inauthentic existence, being-towards-death, and the profound solitude that persists even amid apparent connectivity.

The Foucauldian analysis examines disciplinary power, the Panopticon-like structures of surveillance, and the subtle ways in which modern governance internalises control through discourses of welfare and protection, turning citizens into manageable populations. Agamben’s concept of the state of exception is invoked to illuminate how emergency measures risk normalising authoritarian tendencies, reducing human life to “bare life” stripped of its relational and political dimensions. A Marxist perspective uncovers the poem’s critique of capitalist contradictions, class inequalities, alienation, commodity fetishism, and the ideological hegemony that sustains exploitation even in crisis. The neoliberal critique further elaborates on the atomised, entrepreneurial self, the commodification of relationships, and the erosion of collective solidarity in favour of individual adaptability and competition.

Additional layers include post-humanist and humanist reflections on humanity’s decentring within a web of biological, technological, and ecological forces; an ecocritical reading that contrasts nature’s revival during lockdown with humanity’s anthropocentric arrogance and the metabolic rift induced by capitalism; and a broad civilisational critique that questions the very notions of progress, control, and informational abundance in modernity. Psychoanalytic insights delve into collective unconscious fears, death anxiety, repressed desires, and the shattering of civilisational defences. Finally, the essay situates the poem within utopia-dystopia studies, portraying its vision as a cautionary dystopia that warns of a world rich in superficial expressions yet impoverished in poetic depth and genuine connection, while subtly preserving a latent utopian longing for restored intimacy.

Throughout, the essay provides a detailed close reading of the poem’s imagery—from purifying rivers and silent skies to helpless gods, cunning appreciations, and a virus without a past tense—demonstrating its masterful blending of prophecy, irony, philosophical depth, and cultural observation. A comparative section juxtaposes Shukla’s sombre, interrogative tone with the more hopeful, consolatory vision of Kitty O’Meara’s “And the People Stayed Home” and Simon Armitage’s “Lockdown,” underscoring contrasting responses to the same crisis: one emphasising moral rebirth and reconnection, the other probing enduring civilisational vulnerabilities.

In conclusion, Ranjan’s expansive study establishes “Uttar-Corona” as a seminal work of pandemic literature that transcends its immediate context to offer a sweeping diagnosis of modernity’s ills. It challenges readers to ponder the delicate balance between security and freedom, protection and autonomy, survival and meaningful existence, urging a profound rethinking of power, relationships, ecology, and what it means to remain truly human in an increasingly fragmented and surveilled world. The essay stands as both a meticulous scholarly engagement and a passionate call for cultural and ethical self-examination in the aftermath of global catastrophe.

La recensione prende in esame la monografia di Marzia Minutelli dedicata alla poetessa ligure Rina Pellegri, evidenziandone il valore nell'ambito del recupero delle figure femminili marginalizzate del Novecento italiano. Il contributo analizza la struttura del volume, che combina ricostruzione biografica, ricerca documentaria ed edizione commentata dei testi poetici. Vengono approfonditi i principali temi della produzione pellegriana — il lutto familiare, la memoria, il rapporto con la terra natale e la poesia civile — insieme agli aspetti stilistici e alle influenze letterarie che ne caratterizzano l'opera. La recensione riconosce nel lavoro di Minutelli un fondamentale strumento di ricerca, capace di restituire dignità critica a una voce a lungo trascurata e di contribuire al più ampio processo di revisione del canone poetico novecentesco.

Синтагма зелене студије дуго је коришћена као синоним за екокритику као приступ проучавању књижевности. Свакодневно искуство, али и научна сазнања, упућују ипак на то да термин није сасвим aдекватан: Земља није претежно зелена, већ плава планета. Питање вода неретко је било запостављено у екокритичким промишљањима, те би плава хуманистика (blue humanities) била екохуманистичка перспектива која хидролошке теме истиче као интерпретативно важне, и то не само кроз фигуре преноса, него кроз материјалност и однос са вантекстуалним светом. Након општег увода у плаву хуманистику, са посебним освртом на могуће повезаности са стручном и уметничком рецепцијом у оквирима српске књижевности, рад се заокружује екокритичком анализом песама савремених српских песника
Петра Матовића („Међувршје“) и Ненада Јовановића („Чиста вода“)

This extensive critical essay offers a profound and multilayered analysis of Tarun Bhatnagar’s short story ‘Zakhme-Kuhan’, positioning it as a significant literary work that transcends the personal narrative of a sensitive child’s suffering to become a powerful philosophical interrogation of modern civilisation’s foundational contradictions. At its heart, the story dramatises the eternal conflict between experience and discipline, portraying the poignant relationship between the nature-attuned boy Sundar and his rigidly authoritarian teacher Kshitij as emblematic of broader tensions between spontaneity and control, sensibility and institutional power, and living memory and imposed history. The author, Ravi Ranjan, demonstrates how Bhatnagar’s narrative, through its deceptively simple elements of rain, birds, a neem tree, a schoolroom, and a devastating bus accident, unveils the invisible mechanisms by which modernity’s institutions—particularly education—regulate human consciousness, sever individuals from their sensory world, and commodify both nature and human relations.

The essay meticulously applies an array of theoretical frameworks to illuminate the text’s richness. Drawing extensively on Michel Foucault’s 'Discipline and Punish', it interprets the school as a disciplinary apparatus that produces docile bodies through surveillance, normalisation, and examination, with Kshitij embodying the normalising authority that pathologises uncontrolled natural elements such as birdsong and rainfall while hypocritically teaching Wordsworth’s celebration of the child’s proximity to nature. The Foucauldian reading reveals how punishment transforms into reform, embedding power within the child’s memory and consciousness, turning the cane’s mark into an enduring emblem of institutional violence that extends from the classroom into the wider social machinery symbolised by the indifferent luxury bus.

From a postcolonial perspective, the analysis foregrounds English as a lingering instrument of mental colonisation, exposing the school’s hypocritical reverence for tradition alongside its pragmatic submission to the language of power and market success. Referencing thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and especially Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 'Decolonising the Mind, the essay contrasts Sundar’s lived experiential relationship with nature against Kshitij’s textual, alienated engagement, highlighting the epistemic violence that privileges formal knowledge over indigenous sensory worlds and perpetuates cultural hierarchies long after formal colonial rule has ended.

An ecocritical lens further enriches the reading by presenting nature not as passive backdrop but as an active, resilient protagonist whose indomitable forces—rain, wind, returning birds, and regenerating grass—resist human attempts at domination. The destruction of nests, crushing of eggs, poisoning of birds, and felling of the sacred neem tree are interpreted as acts of anthropocentric hubris that symbolise modernity’s assault on biodiversity and living ecosystems. Echoing Rachel Carson’s 'Silent Spring', the essay celebrates nature’s resilience while critiquing the utilitarian mindset that reduces the nonhuman world to resources or obstacles, contrasting urban alienation with the integrated ecological harmony of village life.

Psychoanalytic and child-centred approaches delve into the inner worlds of the characters, portraying Kshitij’s controlling personality as a defence against repressed chaos and his violence towards Sundar as an attack on his own lost child-self and shadow. Drawing on Freudian notions of repression and civilisation’s discontents, alongside Jungian concepts, the analysis frames Sundar as the embodiment of authentic child consciousness—curious, sensory, and wonder-filled—whose trauma at the hands of a hypocritical education system that glorifies nature in textbooks while punishing its lived experience results in profound psychological wounding. The cane mark and severed hand become enduring symbols of trauma that reshape perception, turning poetry and English into triggers of fear and pain.

Marxist and humanist perspectives complement each other by exposing the capitalist logic of utility, efficiency, and commodification that underlies the story’s institutions, from the time-obsessed luxury bus that prioritises schedule over a mutilated child to the reification of human suffering into spectacle. While the Marxist reading critiques the transformation of education, nature, and relationships into instruments of productivity and profit, the humanist dimension affirms the enduring value of sensibility, compassion, and wonder, finding redemptive hope in Sundar’s unbroken capacity to love the rain even after profound loss. This duality underscores the story’s moral centre: the erosion of humanity amid material progress.

Memory studies further deepen the interpretation by treating the ‘old wound’ of the title as embodied, archival memory that inscribes personal and civilisational trauma upon the body. Connecting Sundar’s scars to V. S. Naipaul’s notion of a wounded civilisation, the essay explores how traumatic memory persists, shaping identity and offering potential resistance rather than mere victimhood. Finally, a subaltern lens, informed by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, casts Sundar as the marginalised figure whose experiential voice is systematically silenced and translated into the language of power, while the broader moral critique questions the ethical legitimacy of a civilisation that sacrifices sensibility, empathy, and freedom at the altars of discipline, development, and efficiency.

Throughout, Ravi Ranjan celebrates the story’s linguistic artistry—its polyphonic blending of Hindi, Urdu, and colloquial rhythms that mirrors its resistance to rigid structures—and its refusal to be confined to any single ideological frame. ‘Zakhme-Kuhan’ emerges not merely as a poignant tale but as a enduring moral document and philosophical inquiry into contemporary existence. It challenges readers to reconsider the true purposes of education, the costs of progress, the relationship between language and lived reality, and the ethical responsibilities of civilisation towards its most sensitive and vulnerable members. By preserving the child’s capacity for wonder amid systemic violence, the story offers a quietly powerful testament to the resilience of human sensibility and the living world, ensuring its profound relevance to ongoing cultural, educational, and environmental discourses in India and beyond. The essay concludes that Bhatnagar’s work, through its hypnotic narrative and rich symbolism, leaves an unhealing wound in the reader’s consciousness—one that continues to provoke ethical self-examination long after the final page.

Il écrivait cinq à six heures par jour. Chaque fois qu'il se présentait sur scène, sa performance éblouissait. Fin pédagogue, ardent défenseur du français au pays, il déployait avec une authenticité et une simplicité désarmantes son intelligence sensible et érudite. Aucun écrivain au Québec n'aura à ce point parlé de la mort dans la vie, avec tristesse et humour, ce dernier registre étant pour lui un « remontant de l'âme ». Aucun, peut-être, n'aura puisé autant dans les voyages, afin de donner à notre littérature un peu d'air, une fenêtre pour que le coeur respire, avec style et acuité. Jusqu'en 2023, il s'est voué à la création avec un désir farouche de liberté et d'invention. Là où il chante son amour de la forêt et de Montréal, où il critique nos modes de consommation qui polluent les océans et s'en prend à la dérive des médias, il est éclectique, pratique l'art du recyclage et des mythes anciens, raconte sous forme de miniatures un monde à la fois proche et lointain, fait sienne l'indétermination générique contre les poncifs qui confinent l'art et la littérature à des usages réducteurs. Sa virtuosité le porte à s'exprimer dans des formes variées, à la recherche toujours d'un sourire, d'une lumière vibrante.

¿Cómo se han desarrollado las formas de encuentro y asociación entre los escritores y escritoras españoles desde el siglo XIX hasta nuestros días, con qué objetivos, en cuáles espacios y según qué relaciones de poder? ¿Y entre intelectuales españoles y de otras procedencias? ¿Qué importancia tienen los intercambios entre los autores y autoras y otros integrantes del campo literario y cultural como los editores, críticos y libreros a la hora de crear sus obras? ¿Cómo se vinculan con otros colectivos del mundo artístico? De los individuos a los grupos y a la inversa, este libro se propone ensayar respuestas a aquellas preguntas, estudiando de qué modos los escritores y escritoras y los agrupamientos de los que forman parte se representan a sí mismos y a otros anteriores o posteriores a ellos, a nivel nacional, regional y pos o transnacional. Aquí nos interesa especialmente reflexionar sobre distintas formas de reunión o lazo: la relación entre maestro y discípulo o precursor y epígono y, en sincronía, sobre los círculos, los salones, las hermandades, las tertulias literarias, las redacciones periodísticas, las academias, las universidades, los partidos políticos, los blogs y las redes sociales. Estos agrupamientos son revisados a partir de las propias obras literarias, pero también desde otras textualidades y acciones culturales muy diversas, como por ejemplo manifiestos, artículos periodísticos, epistolarios, entrevistas, entradas de blogs, emprendimientos editoriales, presentaciones de libros, entre otros. Es decir, un croquis expandido que dibuja las interacciones más o menos completas de la producción literaria y cultural. Lejos del imaginario del artista genial, cuya inspiración surge en soledad, apartado de la plaza pública, la indagación sobre la construcción de "redes" culturales, intelectuales e incluso personales nos abre la puerta al estudio de los proyectos creadores singulares desde una perspectiva más abarcadora, donde dialogan entre sí los deseos de los escritores y escritoras, los vínculos de pertenencia social y la intervención de y en los procesos colectivos.

Shriprakash Shukla is a well know Hindi poet-critic and his work blends tradition, classical poetics, and folk sensibilitie.He has also served as the editor of the literary magazine Parichay. His published poetry collections include People of My Own Kind (Apnī Tarah Ke Log), Where Not Everything is a City (Jahān Sab Shahr Nahīn Hotā), Spoken Words (Bolī Bāt), Figures in the Sand (Ret Meṃ Ākṛtiyām), Orhan and Other Poems (Orhan Aur Anya Kavitāyeṃ), The Poet Said (Kavi Ne Kahā), and Sleep in the Ocean of Milk (Kṣīrasāgar Meṃ Nīnd). He has also authored the critical works Folk Aesthetics in Post-Sixties Hindi Poetry (Sāṭhottarī Hindī Kavitā Meṃ Lok Saundarya) and The Land of Namvar (Nāmvar Kī Dharatī). Shukla's literary contributions have earned him several prestigious accolades, including the Mallkhan Singh Sisodia Award (from Vartaman Sahitya) for Spoken Words, the Naresh Mehta Poetry Award for Figures in the Sand, and the Vijay Dev Narayan Sahi Poetry Award for Orhan and Other Poems, with both of the latter presented by the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan.

This study explores the evolving semantic, cultural, and philosophical significance of three deceptively simple Hindi verbs—jānā (to go), lautnā (to return), and pahuñchnā (to reach)—and demonstrates how, within modern Hindi poetry, they transcend their ordinary grammatical functions to become powerful vehicles of historical consciousness, collective anxiety, memory, displacement, identity, and human existence. Focusing primarily on the movement from Kedarnath Singh’s celebrated formulation of jānā as “the most frightening verb in Hindi” to Shriprakash Shukla’s striking assertion that, in the new century, lautnā has become even more frightening than jānā, the essay investigates how literature records changing structures of fear and transforms them into enduring poetic meaning. 

The article argues that the history of human civilisation may itself be read as a history of departure and return. Across cultures and literary traditions, from classical epics to modern poetry of exile, home has remained a central metaphor for belonging, memory, identity, dignity, and existential security. In this broader context, the study places Hindi poetry in conversation with world literature, particularly the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, whose treatment of exile and homeland illuminates the profound emotional and ontological significance of home as more than a physical location. Home emerges as a symbolic centre of selfhood, cultural continuity, and historical existence, while displacement becomes not merely geographical separation but a rupture in the very foundations of being. 

A major focus of the discussion is Shriprakash Shukla’s poem 'Lautnā' (“Returning”), which is examined as one of the most significant poetic responses to contemporary experiences of migration, insecurity, and social fragmentation. The poem is read not simply as an account of labourers returning home during a moment of national crisis, but as a profound meditation on human vulnerability, hope, memory, and survival. The essay demonstrates that the poem transforms a specific historical event into a wider reflection on the failures of modern development, the limitations of state power, the precarious condition of migrant labour, and the continuing human search for belonging. Through restrained language and emotionally resonant imagery, the poem reveals how the desire to reach home becomes more urgent than even the most basic physical needs, including hunger. In this context, “reaching” becomes a metaphor for recovering security, identity, dignity, and existential meaning. 

Particular attention is given to the poem’s subtle distinction between lautnā (returning) and pahuñchnā (reaching). The study argues that while the title foregrounds the notion of return, the emotional and philosophical centre of the poem lies in the repeated emphasis on reaching. Returning traditionally suggests movement towards the past and towards origins, whereas reaching implies movement towards a desired goal, a future possibility, or the recovery of a meaningful state of existence. Through this semantic shift, Shukla transforms the act of returning into a larger existential project. Home is no longer simply the place one once left behind; it becomes the destination where fractured lives, identities, and hopes may be reassembled. Thus, the poem ultimately privileges arrival over return and presents reaching as a form of self-recovery. 

The essay further demonstrates that Lautnā operates simultaneously on multiple interpretative levels. From a socio-political perspective, it exposes the contradictions of a development model dependent upon migrant labour while failing to guarantee security and dignity to those whose work sustains urban life. The poem interrogates the gap between political assurances and lived realities, revealing how the language of authority often collapses in moments of crisis. Migrant workers emerge as figures who remain indispensable to economic structures yet vulnerable within social and political systems. Their journey home becomes a powerful critique of institutional failure and of a civilisation that measures success through growth while neglecting human welfare. 

From a psychological perspective, the poem is shown to be deeply concerned with the inner life of human beings confronting uncertainty, deprivation, and fear. The desire to reach home functions as a stabilising psychological centre, organising consciousness around a single sustaining objective. Memory emerges as an active force rather than a passive recollection, providing emotional strength, preserving identity, and sustaining the will to live. Hope and fear coexist throughout the poem, generating a dynamic tension that reflects the complexity of human resilience. The labourers continue their journey not because conditions improve but because memory, aspiration, and emotional attachment provide the energy necessary for survival. 

The study also offers an existential reading of Lautnā, arguing that the poem transcends its immediate historical circumstances to engage with universal questions concerning meaning, insecurity, agency, and human existence. The journey towards home becomes a metaphor for the effort to preserve one’s humanity in a world marked by instability and estrangement. Home is interpreted as a site where the individual can recover a coherent sense of self, while reaching becomes synonymous with the search for existential affirmation. In this reading, the poem belongs not only to the discourse of migration and labour but also to the wider philosophical tradition concerned with the human struggle against meaninglessness and alienation.

Another important dimension of the essay lies in its comparative framework. By bringing Shriprakash Shukla into dialogue with Kedarnath Singh, Leeladhar Mandloi, and Mahmoud Darwish, the study reveals how the concepts of going, returning, exile, arrival, memory, and home acquire different meanings across historical and literary contexts. Kedarnath Singh’s anxiety centres upon departure and the insecurity associated with leaving, particularly within patriarchal social structures. Shukla, by contrast, focuses on the terrifying conditions under which return itself becomes fraught with danger. Mandloi exposes the social irony of a return stripped of dignity, while Darwish foregrounds the impossibility of return and the persistence of memory as a substitute for homeland. Together, these poetic voices create a rich discourse on displacement, belonging, and human dignity in the modern world. 

The article concludes that the movement from Kedarnath Singh’s “frightening verb” of going to Shriprakash Shukla’s “frightening verb” of returning reflects a profound transformation in the social imagination of contemporary India. What changes is not merely vocabulary but the very nature of insecurity itself. The study contends that these verbs function as cultural indicators of shifting historical realities and reveal the tensions between individual aspiration and social structures, memory and modernity, mobility and belonging, development and dignity. Ultimately, *Lautnā* emerges as a major achievement of contemporary Hindi poetry because it transforms a historical moment into a civilisational question and demonstrates how ordinary words can illuminate the deepest concerns of human existence. Through its exploration of home, memory, displacement, hope, and survival, the poem offers a compelling reflection on what it means to remain human in an age of uncertainty and rupture. 

Source: Critical article tited "Evolving Semantics of a Frightening Verb: Kedarnath Singh to Shriprakash Shukla" by Professor Ravi Ranjan, University of Hyderabad.

La falegnameria di Menotti Lerro è un poemetto di forte impatto, costruito con una scrittura densamente immaginifica e tecnicamente consapevole, in cui l'autore sviluppa e sperimenta un impianto poetico fondato su dispositivi che definisce come correlativo empatico, dislocazione empatica, metafora empatica e istante empatico. Queste procedure non funzionano solo come scelte stilistiche, ma come strumenti di immersione percettiva ed emotiva: servono a ridurre la distanza tra soggetto, oggetto e lettore, trasformando la realtà materiale (la falegnameria, gli oggetti, il corpo, gli spazi familiari) in una struttura di esperienza condivisa e interiorizzata. In questo senso il testo si colloca in una direzione di sperimentazione poetica contemporanea, dove la componente narrativa e autobiografica si fonde con una ricerca formale sull'empatia come principio costruttivo del linguaggio poetico.

Il mio intervento si concentrerà in particolare su questo saggio, confrontandolo con altri luoghi concettuali importanti dell'opera di Fulvio Papi dedicati al mondo letterario (poetico, ma non solo). 3 Papi stesso ha ricordato l'organizzazione di questi eventi, risalenti al 1979/80; e di Sereni ha scritto che gli «sarà costato non poco dirmi di sì poiché aveva sempre avuto una notevole reticenza a parlare di sé e, ancor meno, del suo fare poetico». Questo e molti altri fondamentali ricordi (e riflessioni critiche) riguardanti Sereni si leggono in F.

Este artículo examina la problemática de la insuficiencia del lenguaje a partir de un estudio comparado de Gabriela Mistral y Alejandra Pizarnik, centrado en los poemas "Una palabra" y "En esta noche, en este mundo". El trabajo descansa en la noción de que ambas autoras articulan una poética del límite en la que la palabra aparece simultáneamente necesaria e insuficiente, que, a su vez, permite demostrar que la crisis del lenguaje no opera como un escollo representativo, sino que deviene principio estructurador del discurso poético.

This artist portfolio contextualizes my work with "typoems"-typographical asemic poetry exploring aphasic experience as a source of inspiration that reflects on the contingency of our interpretations. Collaged typographic fragments have a specific lineage within Concrete and Visual poetry made by graphic designers and artists engaged with printing processes. Digital design software extends and expands these earlier possibilities that were constrained by the physical limitations of typography by allowing the fluid conversion between letterforms and vectorized graphics, changes that facilitate an exploration of the boundaries between lettering and imagery. Included in this portfolio are examples of my work with typoems published by RedFox Press, Timglaset Editions, and the Post-Asemic Press; the book CMYK-52 Typoems :: 4 typefaces | 4 letters | 4 sections (Timglaset, 2023) won a 45 th STA100, The Society of Typographic Arts,

This extensive critical study "Beyond the Grand Narratives: A Postmodern and Postcolonial Re-reading of Shriprakash Shukla’s Poem ‘Phulsuṅghī’ " offers a multifaceted postmodern and postcolonial re-reading of Shriprakash Shukla’s concise yet profoundly resonant Hindi poem ‘Phulsuṅghī’, positioning it as a significant work in contemporary Hindi poetry that quietly resists the overwhelming noise of grand political, ideological, and civilisational narratives by returning attention to the small, often invisible processes of everyday life. The poem, through its deceptively simple depiction of a phulsuṅghī bird meticulously building its nest on a hanging creeper while writing its address, squeezing nectar from flowers, gathering straw amid chaos, and ultimately encircling its own share of sky for new life, encapsulates the deep crises of the contemporary era—including human insecurity, the disintegration of nature, existential emptiness, and the restlessness of a divided world—while simultaneously affirming the stubborn, subtle, and resilient energy of life that persists in creating space for itself even amidst widespread fragmentation and collapse. The analysis begins by examining the poem’s carefully crafted structure, which opens with an intimate, grounded scene of avian domestic labour and gradually expands outward to engage with broader socio-civilisational references such as grand narratives, aerial announcements, storms, voids, and divided borders, maintaining throughout a poetic and suggestive tone rather than descending into overt ideological proclamation, thereby allowing the work to resonate meaningfully on multiple interpretive levels at once.

From a postmodern perspective, the poem is shown to foreground the crisis of modernity’s grand narratives as articulated by Jean-François Lyotard, illustrating the loss of credibility in overarching stories of history, progress, nation, development, and ideological liberation, even as life continues in its modest, concrete, local, and biological forms. The phulsuṅghī, far from participating in any grand project, embodies the postmodern turn towards the micro, the local, and lived experience, resisting the hollow “aerial announcements” of power, media, and hyperreality described by Jean Baudrillard through its tangible, earth-bound labour of nectar-squeezing and nest-building, which privileges small creative acts over totalising ideological clamour and highlights the positive potential within fragmentation for plural, decentralised, and freer forms of existence. This reading is complemented by a postcolonial lens that critiques the artificial borders and divisions imposed by modern nation-states and colonial legacies, interpreting the poem’s climactic image of new life “destroying all divided borders” as a vision of a shared biological and cultural world that transcends geographical, cultural, mental, and political separations. Drawing on thinkers such as Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and Achille Mbembe, the analysis explores themes of hybridity, in-between spaces, subaltern silence expressed through labour rather than speech, necropolitics, and the reconstruction of fragmented worlds, presenting the phulsuṅghī’s nest as an alternative, relational, and non-hierarchical model of identity and coexistence.

An ecocritical interpretation further enriches the study by framing the poem as a subtle yet powerful commentary on the anthropocentric destructiveness of industrial civilisation, which has reduced nature to resources while generating environmental imbalance, climate disruption, and existential alienation from the living world. The phulsuṅghī exemplifies sustainable, symbiotic, non-exploitative participation in natural cycles—building humbly within the creeper, taking only necessary nectar, and creating life amid dried leaves and void—offering a vision of ecological ethics grounded in coexistence, balance, limited consumption, and the regenerative power of nature that persists even in decay and storm. Socialist and labour-centred readings emphasise the dignity of invisible, everyday labour, positioning the phulsuṅghī as a representative of the working classes whose patient, life-affirming toil sustains the world against the backdrop of capitalist insecurity, hollow declarations of progress, and class-based divisions, transforming seemingly mundane acts of gathering straw into profound symbols of creative resistance and moral renewal without resorting to overt revolutionary rhetoric.

Existentialist analysis reveals the poem as a metaphor for modern humanity’s confrontation with absurdity, void, and meaninglessness, evoking Albert Camus’s Sisyphus, Jean-Paul Sartre’s notions of existence preceding essence and condemnation to freedom, and Martin Heidegger’s thrownness. The bird’s persistent nest-building amid storms, flickering swords of destruction, and pervasive nirvat becomes an authentic act of self-created meaning, demonstrating how life forges purpose through small, personal, and resolute actions even when grand assurances have collapsed. Psychoanalytic perspectives uncover layers of split consciousness, repressed anxieties, the interplay between Eros (life instinct) and Thanatos (death instinct), and the artificial laughter masking depression in consumerist society, with the phulsuṅghī embodying psychic shelter, reconstructive energy, and reconnection with natural biological rhythms against the alienated, fragmented psyche of modernity, incorporating insights from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Carl Gustav Jung.

Feminist re-readings illuminate the poem’s celebration of care work, domestic labour, nourishment, protection, and relational sustenance—traditionally undervalued and rendered invisible within patriarchal and capitalist frameworks—portraying the phulsuṅghī as a figure of humble, persistent, life-preserving feminine energy that counters aggressive, dominance-based models of development and instead foregrounds relationality, humility, and future-oriented preservation, aligning with ecofeminist concerns regarding the parallel oppression of women and nature. The study also situates the poem within the rich traditions of Indian philosophical thought, drawing connections to the Bhagavad Gita’s emphasis on nishkama karma, the Upanishadic vision of universal consciousness and shared existence expressed in the Isha Upanishad, Buddhist concepts of impermanence and shunyata, Samkhya’s dynamic view of nature, and the cyclical understanding of creation, preservation, and destruction symbolised by Shiva’s Tandava, thereby presenting the phulsuṅghī’s actions as embodiments of eternal life-energy that flows through destruction into regeneration and affirms a profound biological and cosmic unity.

Finally, formalist, structuralist, and post-structuralist approaches attend closely to the poem’s artistic construction—its defamiliarising imagery, paradoxical language, phonetic density, binary oppositions that refuse closure, and the deferral of fixed meaning through rich symbolism—revealing how its restrained, simple diction generates complex polyphonic resonances. Cleanth Brooks’s language of paradox, Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie, Roman Jakobson’s poeticity, Ferdinand de Saussure’s differential signs, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s binaries, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, and Michel Foucault’s discourses on power and knowledge all illuminate the poem’s internal tensions and its resistance to singular interpretation. Collectively, this expansive analysis demonstrates that ‘Phulsuṅghī’, despite its modest scale, opens vast possibilities for critical dialogue across diverse frameworks, ultimately affirming the poem’s enduring power as a testament to life’s quiet, creative persistence and its capacity to imagine more humane, shared, and meaningful worlds amidst contemporary fragmentation, offering readers not despair but a profound, grounded hope rooted in the smallest yet most resilient acts of existence.    " offers a multifaceted postmodern and postcolonial re-reading of Shriprakash Shukla’s concise yet profoundly resonant Hindi poem ‘Phulsuṅghī’, positioning it as a significant work in contemporary Hindi poetry that quietly resists the overwhelming noise of grand political, ideological, and civilisational narratives by returning attention to the small, often invisible processes of everyday life. The poem, through its deceptively simple depiction of a phulsuṅghī bird meticulously building its nest on a hanging creeper while writing its address, squeezing nectar from flowers, gathering straw amid chaos, and ultimately encircling its own share of sky for new life, encapsulates the deep crises of the contemporary era—including human insecurity, the disintegration of nature, existential emptiness, and the restlessness of a divided world—while simultaneously affirming the stubborn, subtle, and resilient energy of life that persists in creating space for itself even amidst widespread fragmentation and collapse. The analysis begins by examining the poem’s carefully crafted structure, which opens with an intimate, grounded scene of avian domestic labour and gradually expands outward to engage with broader socio-civilisational references such as grand narratives, aerial announcements, storms, voids, and divided borders, maintaining throughout a poetic and suggestive tone rather than descending into overt ideological proclamation, thereby allowing the work to resonate meaningfully on multiple interpretive levels at once.

From a postmodern perspective, the poem is shown to foreground the crisis of modernity’s grand narratives as articulated by Jean-François Lyotard, illustrating the loss of credibility in overarching stories of history, progress, nation, development, and ideological liberation, even as life continues in its modest, concrete, local, and biological forms. The phulsuṅghī, far from participating in any grand project, embodie...

Isabel Nogueira (aka Bel_Medula) é pianista, compositora, poeta, pesquisadora e produtora musical. Doutora em Musicologia, produz canções experimentais usando voz, piano e sintetizadores. É professora na Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul e coordenadora do Grupo de Pesquisa Sônicas: gênero, corpo e música. Lançou diversos álbuns de música experimental e de canções por selos do Brasil e do exterior. É especialista em escuta profunda pelo Deep Listening Institut. Trabalha em uma metodologia de processos criativos a partir da escuta, dos sonhos e da escrita de diários.
Desde 2003, vem publicando livros e artigos sobre música e gênero e, em 2025, publica Metodologia do Encantamento, seu primeiro livro de poesias.
Nas palavras de Marília Kosby para a quarta capa do livro, “este livro é um inventário de Isabel esperneando essas maneias, ora búfala, ora borboleta. Um inventário delicado-denso do seu catar o extraordinário naquilo que há de mais banal: a bagunça da casa, o fenecer de uma samambaia, as paredes sem fim. Com o olhar, a escuta, o tato de gente multipovoada, a Isabel poeta adivinha o sublime no detalhe, na última água do banho, na essência daquela florzinha branca recém-sonhando abundar laranjas”.

This essay offers a new interpretation of Eugenio Montale’s "Carnevale di Gerti", focusing on the interplay between biographical fact, poetic fiction, and mythical archetype. Starting from Montale’s own remarks on Gerti as both a real figure and a form of poetic doubling, the study argues that Gertruden Frankl gradually assumes, within the poem, the symbolic features of Isis. The carnival setting is read in connection with the ancient "Navigium Isidis", the ritual procession from which the modern Carnival partly derives. Several details in the poem—the melted lead, the exotic animals, the peacocks, the suspended temporality between December and Carnival, and the image of winged regeneration—are interpreted as traces of the Isiac myth and of the death and resurrection of Osiris. Yet the poem does not culminate in rebirth. The magical and festive illusion collapses into the modern landscape of sterility and disenchantment, where spring no longer flowers and the divine archetype is absorbed by historical time. In this perspective, "Carnevale di Gerti" becomes a meditation on the failure of myth in modernity: the ancient promise of renewal survives only as an elusive echo within poetic language.

The canon follows the same broad historical frame as the earlier Habsburg/Austro-Hungarian literature canon: before 1804, the Habsburg hereditary lands, the southern Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary are treated as the relevant political-cultural space; from 1804 to 1867, the Austrian Empire; from 1867 to 1918, Austria-Hungary; and from 1918 to 1925, a tapering-off period for projects and literary formations shaped by the Dual Monarchy. The entries are ordered by first publication, serialization, or book publication where that is the conventional date.

This critical analysis examines Abu Bakr Solomons' contemporary poem "Wig (less) (for Precious Gumede)" (2019) as a profound literary exploration of Black natural beauty, selfreclamation, and decolonial liberation. The study evaluates how the poem utilizes a free verse structure across nine chronological stanzas to map a thematic progression from artificial concealment to sovereign authenticity. By investigating the dialectical tension between synthetic, restrictive imagery ("fibred crown," "dreadful itch") and elemental, organic imagery ("rain," "ebony crop"), this analysis demonstrates how the text frames the removal of a wig as a radical, baptismal unburdening. Furthermore, the paper traces the poem's tonal evolutionshifting from quiet digital observation and collective empathy to an expansive, politically charged ancestral manifesto. Ultimately, this analysis illustrates how Solomons elevates a seemingly mundane cosmetic choice from a social media profile into a potent micro-political act of Black female ontology and African cultural pride.

This conversation between California- based American Poet-Editor Danielle Hanson (DH) and Prayagraj-based Indian Poet-Professor Susheel Kumar Sharma (SKS) took place via email over a period of nine months, from Sept 2024 to June 2025. Susheel is a Professor of English at the University of Allahabad, Prayagraj, the fourth oldest university of India. Unlike many others, Susheel has not been a prolific poet. This wide-ranging literary interview probes the craft, ethics and cultural politics that shape Sharma’s third poetry collection, Unwinding Self (2020), while mapping three decades of his creative evolution. Structured around fifteen substantial questions, the dialogue ranges from close readings of key poems to broader reflections on pedagogy, ecological crisis, gender violence, spirituality, and the role of the poet in society. Hanson presses Sharma on the personal-universal dialectic. Sharma explains how teaching, multilingualism and post-colonial location recalibrate his voice from youthful introspection through social satire to philosophical witness.
Sharma candidly reflects on ecological degradation, gender violence, and spiritual hypocrisy. He positions poetry as an ethical space that can elevate the ordinary, interrogate systems, and preserve human dignity amidst silence and erasure. Sharma also outlines his concept of the “ideal reader”– a synthesis of the Western “writerly reader” and the Indian sahrdaya pāṭhaka. The interview culminates in a discussion of the book’s unusual inclusion of seven international afterwords as a deliberate act of critical polyphony. The conversation concludes with practical guidance for emerging poets. This interview will be of interest to scholars of Indian poetry in English, postcolonial literature, comparative poetics, and creative writing pedagogy, as well as to poets and readers engaged with cross-cultural aesthetics and ethical imagination.
Keywords: Poetry, Pedagogy, Postcolonialism, Spirituality, Intertextuality, Environment, Ethics and Aesthetics

The research demonstrates that racism in the United States continues to exist
although it has changed since its initial form. Racism used to exist as an obvious
force which people could not suppress. The modern world has seen a decrease in
racism because society understands the problem better but it still exists through
different hidden methods. The situation becomes more challenging for people to
recognize and handle because the problem persists throughout society with their
existence. The phenomenon occurs in all societies across the globe but particularly
affects America and Africa where people suffer harassment during cross-community
interactions which creates various mental health and other issues. The concept of
color-blind racism demonstrates how society today stays away from open
conversations about race while enhancing racial divisions.