Wednesday, November 02, 2016

Letter from India: Worshipping at a Stone Manasa


Back in the 1990s, when I edited the poetry broadsheet Samizdat, my favorite part of the job involved receiving dispatches about poetry from all over the world. We published them as part of a series called "The Word From..." I feel lucky to be able to revive something like that feature of Samizdat at Plume, where I'm not the editor of the monthly "Essays & Comment" section.  The first of what I hope will be many "Letters From..." features is now online: Linda Ashok's "Letter from India: Worshipping at a Stone Manasa." It's an examination of the poetry of the Naxalbari Movement, a social and political uprising that began in the late 1960s. The poetry hits hard and hits home, and is virtually unknown in the West. Read about it here!