Contemplative poems write a contentious love letter to a flawed
world.
"In poems that focus on gender and race-based violence, environmental
destruction, and grief, Chakraborty investigates the unknown,
unexpected, and unexplained." --Publishers Weekly
"About a quarter of the way through Sumita Chakraborty's Arrow, the
reader encounters an impossible poem called 'Dear, beloved.' It's
impossible because who could write it? It's as large, in its way, as any
epic, but as compressed as any lyric, and as beautiful as any lyric, but
as foundational as any epic, but it seems to come after all things,
though it seems, also, diurnal. And it's impossible also because it's a
highlight, not the highlight, of Arrow, a debut as assured as any first
or last book, as compelling as any, as well-made." --Shane A. McCrae
"I stand in awe of Sumita Chakraborty's visionary collection, by turns
epic and compressed in scope, weighty in its tapestry-like materiality
and sleekly dynamic as an arrow. The mythic and literary, here, are
invigorated by seeming autobiography, which in turn gains collective
energy and heft from the poems' timeless tropes and themes. Seamless and
diverse in form, cosmic in subject and image, one feels in the presence
of an oracular intelligence and an abiding lyric imagination." --Diane
Seuss
"This powerful and endlessly mysterious collection of poems is a book of
fables, of spells, of revised narratives, and of realigned songs,
brightly lifted above our bodies by music that is as unpredictable as it
is marvelous. The lyricism is everywhere apparent as Sumita Chakraborty
addresses us, our bodies and their stories, our planet, and our sense of
time itself. How does she do it? Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry, W. H.
Auden wrote about Yeats, and as the hurt enters Chakraborty's language,
we see that in speech violated, sounds and meanings--and even the oldest
of human mysteries, like 'the etymology of love'--are redefined. All one
can do is repeat: this is an endlessly compelling book. Bravo." --Ilya
Kaminsky