Pre-Order The Longed For Longed For, the debut poetry collection by Sibani Sen.
5.83" X 8.27"
70 pages. Perfect Bound.
ISBN: 978-1-952869-95-2
Sibani Sen's poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including Off the Coast, Saranac Review, Tampa Review, Rogue Agent and SWIMM. She has worked on many collaborative multimedia projects including exhibits at the Harvard Hutchins Center, the Concord Museum, and the Green Street Studio in Massachusetts. She has also co-created experimental performances at the Public Theater and with Movement Without Borders in New York. Sibani's current work includes forthcoming poetry and translations of the pre-modern Indian poet Bharatchandra. She teaches creative writing and history and can be found at sibanisen.com
Advanced Praise:
This is a beautiful book, the poems a mix of the philosophical and the physical. The poems are subtle, discreet, and inviting. The book is partly a migrant love story, as the lovers try to make a new world for themselves, "Arm-in-arm we stare out into air rustling with/ wishes, moth-struck..." And it is partly an elegy for a lost loved one, likely a father.
From the title poem:
"Someday l will go to the wall
Where you leaned at last-
I will see your bowed and burnished head,
Silvered curls and milky eyes.
I will hear your voice rattle,
Scolding and sweet."
The speaker will go to the wall where the deceased leaned at last. It's an ominous statement, a prefiguring of the speaker's death, but also a statement of love and togetherness, the speaker wishing to be with the older person, his silvered curls and scolding, rattling voice. Sen's speaker comes up against the silence of death, feels the great sorrow, yet embraces hope in her moments of yearning: "Find me in that valiant true night./ Let me see you again."
-Cammy Thomas is the author of Cathedral of Wish, Inscriptions, Tremors and Odysseus' Daughter. She is winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and recipient of honors from Massachusetts Book Awards.