Moon in My Teacup

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Author: Basudhara RoyA sample cover of the book: navy blue coloured handloom sari with gold embossed nameplate and lettering for the title and author's name. The border of the sari lines the right hand margin of the cover.
Pages: 92
Year of Publication: 2019
Price: Rs 300
ISBN:
978-93-5045-189-2 (9789350451892)

About the Author
Born in 1986, Basudhara Roy has been teaching English for the last eight years as Assistant Professor in Karim City College, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. A student of St. Xavier’s School, Bokaro Steel City, and later, an alumnus and gold medallist of Banaras Hindu University (2009), Basudhara was awarded the UGC Junior Research Fellowship and has earned her doctoral degree from Kolhan University, Chaibasa, for her work on the exploration of cultural space in the short fiction of Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Her poems, articles, short stories and research papers have appeared in several journals within the country. This is her first collection of poems. Fond of books, plants, music, and good conversation, Basudhara lives in Jamshedpur with her husband and two little sons.

Teaser

Taking the Cue

I take my cue of love
from commercial advertisements,
furtively-read women’s magazines,
and the husky Bollywood songs of my adolescence.

The senses are schooled to respond
to the rise and fall of quivering glances,
to the gradual inching together of expectant bodies,
to the vibrant play of fingertips on palpably throbbing flesh.

I long for the astounding riot of colours –
red, orange, yellow, gold – the kaleidoscope bursting open,
raining its ostentatious patterns in dappled waves of virgin silk,
on senses already smoking like camphor on flame.

The night becomes a young damsel waiting to be fulfilled.
Her luxuriant darkness becomes the mattress of my longing.
My dutifully-knotted morning hair urges the reciprocity of desire
to be set free in wild tresses of self-conscious abandonment.

You only turn upon your back and sleep.
Perhaps you take your cue from a different source.

A review of the book can be read here.

Contents
52 poems

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