Legion of Lost Letters: Dramatic Monologues of Romans in Exile

Moving through the puckered stone of Roman ruins in the present, poet Debasish Lahiri unearths rumpled vestments of the human heart buried there, making the ruins revenant. On the leeward side of heraldry and historical oversight women and men, lovers and misanthropes, unwilling gladiators and unlikely saints, doomed dreamers and gullible aesthetes thrive in the pages of Legion of Lost Letters. These forgotten beings from beyond the millennial horizon ponder the second millennium. The light of these lives, effigies of breathing, made pale and frail by time, resonates Legion of Lost Letters: a light that is not yet loud enough to be heard.

Debasish Lahiri is an internationally acclaimed poet.

His poems have been widely published in journals like The Journal of the Poetry Society of

India, Muse-India, Indian Literature, Inkapture, The Poetry Salzburg Review, Mediterranean

Poetry, Weber: The Contemporary West, Six Seasons Review, Byword, The Punch Magazine

and The French Literary Review among others; in French translation in Siècle 21, Europe,

Recours au Poème & La Traductière; in Italian in NUOVI ARGOMENTI and in

Portuguese in NERVO: Colectivo de Poesia. Lahiri is currently on the editorial board of Gitanjali & Beyond (Scottish Centre for

Tagore Studies). He is a reviewer and regular contributor to the ‘Life & Letters’ column

of The Statesman newspaper. Lahiri’s essay on the pandemic in Kolkata appeared in the

L’Obs magazine on 27 th July 2021.

Lahiri is the recipient of the Prix-du Merite, Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2019. He is an

honorary member of Maison Naaman pour la Culture.