La Buranella (1996), Prima e dopo (2000), Il teatro vivente (2007), and La signora di porcellana (2012). Tarozzi touches on a great variety of topics, including personal and public realms, everyday events, memories, friends (“Rosanna”), and historical-political issues relating to Italy. Her poetic prose in The Living Theatre perhaps even evokes a kind of baroque Welttheater or “world history.” Maria-Luise Caputo-Mayr New York Linda Ashok. Whorelight. Kolkata, India. Hawakal. 2017. 76 pages. In an interview, Linda Ashok, a poet from India whose first collection of poetry, Whorelight, was recently published with a foreword by renowned poet George Szirtes, explains how she came by this title: “I realized how light engages with lives on earth to rescue them from their darkness. Is it being a whore?” She engages, therefore, with a world mysteriously lit up. The light worms into her body to make her declare, “Inside this poem is a worm that fears abundance.” The abundance of light bothers her. Mythically , a whore operates in a twilight zone that mixes dark shades of surrender and despair, giving her to “all weathers alike.” Hence, Whorelight becomes synonymous with that soft light of compassion, concern, and love that spreads over humanity in an even fashion. These poems come from a mind that reacts to sensations like chlorophyll in a leaf. The sensations can range from having sex with a vague lover, a memory, or guilt. Ashok bleeds poetry wherever the needle pricks her, but “next day, (she wakes) up with the sun in (her) lungs, once again burning images into clots.” In poems addressed to a mysterious AB, Ashok hopes for a thunder that can crack them open to “spill, like lovers, like rain, on parched metal,” convinced that “we can still sow seeds with our mouths, etch the soil, spit the seeds and wait for life to surprise us with flowers.” But it comes with a warning: “be careful when you advance to un-tongue me,” because “sometimes she [stands] still like a whore contemplating the economy of lust.” Or, she could be “contemplating on the lives of workers inked by the grime of disquiet machines.” For Ashok, memories are promises to “send fireflies to the lighthouse to be able / to signal the world that you aren’t alone.” Or to remind us that “to feel love, you have to pull yourself out of the envelope that God posted.” She wants her poems and readers to meet like “two forests, singing to each other” and “to exchange birds, chaos” to “merge.” And merged, we are. Ravi Shanker N. Palakkad, India Kiriti Sengupta. Solitary Stillness. Kolkata. Hawakal. 2017. 62 pages. Poetry is a journey in quietude, and Kiriti Sengupta’s Solitary Stillness is no exception. Sengupta has traveled extensively, and his poetic exuberance is neatly interwoven with a sensitive mind. The unique juxtaposition of prose and poetry compels the reader to enter into this mesmerizing world of Sengupta ’s creation. He has aptly played the role of a “catalytic agent that fuses varied emotions into new wholes.” The diverse references and allusions, ranging from the Chandimangalkavya to the Manhattan Skyline , reveal the versatility of the poet as well as his familiarity with “our culture” and “their culture.” Sengupta takes ample space to play with poetic diction and semantic deviation, making his poetry multilayered and suggestive . At times, the apparent lucidity of his verses pinpoints the dichotomy of our patriarchal society: “all along you lived a life where / Baba remained the chief, and you / his subordinate?” With his master strokes, Sengupta offers an all-pervasive analysis of the microcosm, his seemingly nonchalant style being the most powerful weapon to demolish our long-cherished views about human life: the claustrophobic existence in the City of Joy as depicted in “The Bengali Phenomenon”; the suffering of Christ in the time of crucifixion as written in “Expressions”; and the appalling lightlessness when shadows grow longer as portrayed in “Illumination.” Sengupta extends the metaphor of the book’s title in some of the poems, emphasizing the essential loneliness of our existence when we speak to ourselves in prose or verse: “I now have arrived to an understanding . I no longer seek company.” “Our birth is...