A Map of Ruins

Nabanita Kanungo

Sahitya Akademi, 70 pages, Rs. 70

This debut collection of brooding and wistful poems is written from the perspective of a forever-uprooted habitué of north-east India—particularly Meghalaya and Assam, but also an ancestral but never-visited Sylhet. Kanungo observes with great joy the ever-present, even if denuded, natural world, and is “addicted to the silken craft of pain.”