In Knotted Grief, Naveen Kishore transforms mourning into a language of startling beauty and moral witness. Across a sequence of spare, luminous poems, he explores the intimate relationship between personal sorrow and collective suffering, weaving together images of ash, shadows, silence, blood-red flowers, broken landscapes, and unfinished dreams.
The collection opens with Kashmiriyat, a powerful cycle of more than one hundred interconnected poems that bears witness to the ongoing trauma of Kashmir. Here, widows wait, children remember missing friends, streets become cemeteries of grief, and entire landscapes seem haunted by violence. Yet Kishore's poems resist spectacle. Their brevity, repetition, and carefully sculpted white space create a language of restraint through which devastation becomes palpable.
Subsequent sections turn inward, examining memory, aging, loss, love, displacement, dreams, and the fragile persistence of human connection. The poems move fluidly between waking life and surreal dreamscapes populated by angels, shadows, blue-faced boys, rivers, birds, and shifting fragments of memory. Throughout, Kishore combines the visual sensibility of a photographer with the precision of a minimalist poet, producing poems that are both cinematic and deeply intimate.
Written in a voice that is meditative, haunted, and compassionate, Knotted Grief asks how we continue to live with absence, how private wounds intersect with historical violence, and how language itself might bear witness to what cannot fully be spoken. This remarkable debut is both an elegy and an act of resistance, finding unexpected beauty within devastation.
Kishore, Naveen: - Born in Calcutta in 1953, Naveen Kishore received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature in 1973, and began working as a theatre lighting designer. He established Seagull Books in 1982, a publishing program in the arts and media focusing on drama, film, art and culture studies. Today, it also publishes literature, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction. In 1987 Kishore established The Seagull Foundation for the Arts, under the auspices of which he set up The Seagull School of Publishing in 2012.Kishore is a photographer who has extensively documented female impersonators from Manipuri, Bengali and Punjabi theatre practices. In particular he photographed Chapal Bhaduri, a female impersonator of the Bengali folk theatre, Jatra, in a project entitled Performing the Goddess. Some of these pictures were exhibited as a part of a show titled Woman/Goddess. More recently in 2019 his suite of colour images from the Performing the Goddess project were exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery as a part of the Moving Still exhibition. More recently, Kishore exhibited his work at Chatterjee & Lal in Bombay in the exhibition Greenroom of the Goddess.Kishore is the recipient of the Goethe Medal, a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was awarded the 2021 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.Kishore has had his poems published with Scroll.in, Queen Mob's Tea House, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, RIC Journal, Gargoyle, Poetry at Sangam, Sylph Editions, London amongst others.Kishore lives and works in Calcutta, India.
