{"id":1459,"date":"2014-06-08T00:10:50","date_gmt":"2014-06-07T23:10:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/?p=1459"},"modified":"2019-11-11T11:40:53","modified_gmt":"2019-11-11T11:40:53","slug":"kalagora-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/?p=1459","title":{"rendered":"Kalagora"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Kalagora’ comprises of two independent works: a book of poetry developed over the course of eight years and a one-man play that was written and developed since autumn 2010. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Book<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nKalagora<\/em> by Siddhartha Bose
\nPublished 1st October 2010
\nPenned in the Margins
\n96pp, RRP: \u00a38.99
\nISBN 978-0-9565467-4-6<\/p>\n

Buy from Penned in the Margins<\/a><\/p>\n

_<\/p>\n

In this dazzling debut collection by Indian-born poet Siddhartha Bose, the cities of Kolkata, Mumbai, New York and London are transformed into sites of fractured vision.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bose has created a volatile, dynamic poetics in which love and longing compete with the hybrid, multicultural cityscape. A five-part structure reflects this multiplicity: ‘Prolectric’ and ‘Epilepsis’ book-end sequences on childhood and initiation (‘Sunya’), love (‘Maya’) and the city (\u2018Nagri\u2019). Kalagora<\/em> is a Hindi neologism meaning black man \/ white man; this book tells his story.<\/p>\n

“One of the most exciting first collections I’ve come across in a long time … Kalagora bestrides continents and celebrates cities as engines of creativity where dogs talk in hieroglyphs and where a man can be a moth.”
\nIan McMillan, The Verb on BBC Radio 3<\/em><\/strong> (download Mp3<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201cEmerging fully formed with this exquisitely crafted debut, Siddhartha Bose intrigues, surprises, shocks and seduces the reader, pushing the text to the edges of truth. This is a guttural, painfully honest text, yet at times tender and emotive, the sound of the poems creating a form of sculpture for the ear. The book spans continents and cities: Calcutta, Bombay, London, New York. A truly contemporary work which does what good poetry does best: to make the personal universal and the international local.\u201d
\nAnthony Joseph<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cTraversing and bridging continents, juxtaposing unusual syntactical relationships, Bose in Kalagora <\/em>cleverly interweaves the politics of colour \u2014 black, white, brown \u2014 where race is both a metaphor of separateness and metropolitan co-existential chic. There is multiculturalism, romanticism, orientalism; travel, rebellion, jazz; fantasy, love, sex. Kalagora<\/em> is one of the most impressive debut volumes I have read in recent years.\u201d
\nSudeep Sen<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cForget the usual flimflam about the \u2018potential\u2019 of the debut collection; Kalagora<\/em> introduces Bose as a poet well into his stride. These emanations from the author\u2019s token cities tentacle back to a kind of electrolife that sustains the entire collection. Here, amid filmic precision, extraordinary dare and constant ingenuity, Bose directs a vaudevillian array of seemingly apocryphal characters that come and go with metamorphic freedom. This is rampantly active and<\/em> radioactive poetry; crammed with shock visions and a siege of narratives. The cumulative effect is powerful and intense; Kalagora<\/em> is a vital book of poems for the 21st<\/sup> century.\u201d
\nJames Byrne<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cBose\u2019s use of language \u2013 invented words, nouns made into verbs and other colourful concoctions \u2013 produces a writhing, seething, pulsating poetry.\u201d
\nPoetry Book Society Bulletin<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

“There is a sense of an Odyssean voyage, a continuous exile, full of temptation and danger […] This is a collection that is always dramatic, always in tune with the sensational possibilities of language and the spectacular turn of phrase […] fusing cities together and describing a planet that is globally interconnected and globally aware.”<\/p>\n

Charles Beckett, Wasafiri<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

“Bose is also a \u201chybrid\u201d poet, in the post-colonial sense of the term \u2013 his work in Kalagora<\/em> aiming to merge, bridge, fuse, and intertwine (as they say), the diction, themes, and experiences, of various centres’<\/p>\n

Todd Swift, Poetry Review<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cKalagora is an incantatory assertion, if not of identity, then of power and confidence in moving through identities. […] The book ranges across India, London and New York, negotiating traditional and contemporary cultures with a confidence which doesn\u2019t feel at home anywhere, but is prepared to make claims anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tony Williams, Magma<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

“Pitting the surrealist against the Romantic, Bose carves out a mongrelized but fruitful crop, proving with Kalagora that a new and vital generation of \u2018diaspora\u2019 poets is desperately needed to forge new models among the tired ways of thinking about race, distance and the \u2018immigrant experience\u2019.”<\/p>\n

Sandeep Parmar, The Wolf magazine<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Kalagora’ comprises of two independent works: a book of poetry developed over the course of eight years and a one-man play that was written and developed since autumn 2010. The Book Kalagora by Siddhartha Bose Published 1st October 2010 Penned in the Margins 96pp, RRP: \u00a38.99 ISBN 978-0-9565467-4-6 Buy from Penned in the Margins _ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1459"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2543,"href":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459\/revisions\/2543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kalagora.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}