Navigating the Quartz Forest

Each dreamlike lyric in Biman Roy's Navigating the Quartz Forest is charmingly paired with a small handwritten note hastily jotted down on blue-lined notebook paper-artifacts from his daughter's life outside the family home. "All through the evening, we keep talking nonessentials, / tiptoeing around secret tulips," he says. These notes, like scraps of overheard conversations removed from their natural habitats, become the crystalline seeds of new poems. Side-by-side with each other, the poems act as translator for these somewhat oracular messages from an unknown world of teenage gossip and pop culture references, fitting the pieces together like a shattered mirror and filling in the jagged-edged gaps with the poet's expansive imagination. In Navigating the Quartz Forest, Roy's whimsical poems become a sparkling tribute from a father to his beloved daughter.