Checklist Anomaly: Gogyoshi

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

Rajorshi Patranabis shapes an original story of the speaker’s travels and yearnings which communicate the truth about human existence. — The Statesman (Dustin Pickering)

Patranabis’ word-paintings are as vivid as John Keats’ descriptions of autumn or the Grecian urn; he breathes life into inked words, just as Pygmalion breathes life into Galatea with a kiss…One admires the poet’s craft and is mesmerized, reading on in a fascinated daze even as their heart breaks along with that of the narrator. — Indian Literature (Jagari Mukherjee)

Rajorshi Patranabis represents to me the work of a poet who has taken the quiet time out and surrendered to the calling of the vertical trajectory. — The Bangalore Review (Urna Bose)

Rajorshi Patranabis’s poems are composed of short, staccato lines, creating sharp but deep impressions. — Saaranga Books (Nabanita Sengupta)

• When a noir runs across veins like a blade, a green burgeons, and rains fire on the streets. Everyone tries to find the chiaroscuro, constantly invaded by the blasting green. It involves lovers who meet in a food stall perched on a dingy street, betrayed cynics who wait at the platform called death, an unemployed youth who plays a tune to a stranger at the suicide forest in Japan, two astronauts who fall in love, and chrysanthemums which signs a treaty with a traitor in the dead of the night. The flashbacks in Patranabis’ noir gloriously die with an old midnight choir and find peace in a glass of wine by the bedside of a blind pianist. The anomaly of a Japanese form creates a continuum and breaks with a black hole that sits like a femme fatale in the heart of words, words, and words. In a snowclad nowhere-land rests a checkpost hugged by a bare tin wire and carries a certain overcoat containing a withered note of everything unsaid and undone. Checklist Anomaly is the requiem that Patranabis offers, the first-ever collection of gogyōshi written in English by an Indian poet.