Peace Is What Our Hearts Seek: Kalpna Singh-Chitnis’s Love Letters to Ukraine, by Candice Louisa Daquin Book Reviews [email protected] Tue, 09/19/2023 - 16:07 In Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava (River Paw Press, 2023), Kalpna Singh-Chitnis writes an urgent tribute for Ukraine, the same urgency she employed when putting together her Ukraine anthology Sunflowers: Ukrainian Poetry on War, Resistance, Hope and Peace. In Love Letters, Singh-Chitnis compiles a series of echo refrain poems for an embattled nation. Her own sympathy is not sentimental so much as pragmatic and hopeful. Hers is not a patronizing tone but a welcoming one: meditate on these things, help others, be more. It is both an antithesis to the me, me, me modern culture and a meditation on what matters most. In “War: A One Way Street,” she observes: “There is no glory in a war. / Every home has a shrine. / A war cannot be defined. / It can only be lived or imagined.” Later, in the poem “Nothing Is Permanent,” the poet considers mortality, how we cease and yet continue, and what part humanity plays in the creation and endurance of the world. These philosophical considerations are presented without pretense and evoke a desire to think beyond the moment, hence the necessity and value of poetry in times of war—a long-established tradition, because who better to speak on war but the poet? To voice metaphorically the machinations of this war, she writes: Let’s not... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2023-09-19 21:07:47 UTC ]
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The book trade is a “custodian of empathy” and plays a vital part in reminding the world of the universality of the human condition, writer and broadcaster Sally Magnusson has said. Continue reading at The Bookseller
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“Fat City” is old slang for prosperity and advantage—the good life. If you’re in Fat City, you’re in luck. But the phrase is wry irony as the title of a novel that has stunned and mesmerized successive generations of readers since its publication in 1969. This month New York Review Books brings... Continue reading at Slate
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