A collection of poems by Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla, which twists through villages, rooms, rivers, trees and domestic objects, attending to how precarious our relationship with the world can be.

A dried-up river contains the remains of other rivers beneath it; a park of tree stumps resembles a prisoner-of-war camp; a window screen appears to imprison the landscape beyond it. His language is spare and deceptively simple, moving between humour, ecological loss, political violence and the loneliness of being alive. Rather than explaining these images, Shukla allows their contradictions to remain.

Presented bilingually in Hindi and English, the collection draws from several decades of his poetry, offering an introduction to a writer whose attention to the material world continually opens into questions of memory, absence, displacement and survival.

Edition / Condition: Circumference Books, 2024. First English-language edition. Bilingual Hindi–English paperback. Good to very good condition, with light cover and edge wear.