Satya Dash

Satya Dash is the recipient of the 2020 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2020 Broken River Prize. His poems appear in The Boiler, Anomaly, Chestnut Review, Rhino Poetry, Cincinnati Review, and Diagram, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator. He has been nominated previously for Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore, India. He tweets at: @satya043

Note on Poetics

The alternating idea of convergence and divergence—of senses, memory, food—is at the heart of so much of the span of human pleasure. In this regard, most of my recent work has been invested in the intersection of human desire with rural and urban habitats, in discovering inexplicable unions of language and image in the particularly dissonant overlaps.

As our planet hurtles from one crisis to another, how so many of us have waded through loss with hearts heavy and brains foggy for the last 20 months, it has been impossible to not ponder the grand questions of existence, the trappings of what we have been accustomed to hail as progress, the ways how meaning is made, often simultaneously, in language and life. In the face of despair, what might a centri-petal/fugal network of rejuvenated senses look like? Is reviving imagination, some kind of new world-making sense crucial to any sustenance going forward? To open some windows to such possible worlds, these poems make an effort to trace the trajectory of short movies on the page. A conscious effort was to not try covering cracks by resolution but inhabiting those zones of discomfort while trying to find in them new turns of passage as well as cadence.

A personal exercise in gratitude when I found myself alone in lockdown for large parts of the year was to write letters to my child-self. A theme that annoyingly kept coming up was the need to explain that simplification doesn’t necessarily bring clarity. In fact so often it dilutes experience and paints hubris over our need to acknowledge missteps along the way. The human condition is a gloriously intricate contradiction, and it seems the idea of illumination is not by breaking down things to make them simple, but placing the eye of the animal’s messy heart on thresholds, where instead of ticking off checklists and moving on, it wants to see, feel, listen and connect because only at this point, it can develop a capacity to supply light of its own.