Navigating the Quartz Forest

Each dreamlike lyric in Biman Roy’s Navigating the Quartz Forest is charmingly paired with a small handwritten note hastily jotted down on blue-lined notebook paper—artifacts from his daughter’s life outside the family home. “All through the evening, we keep talking nonessentials, / tiptoeing around secret tulips,” he says. These notes, like scraps of overheard conversations removed from their natural habitats, become the crystalline seeds of new poems. Side-by-side with each other, the poems act as translator for these somewhat oracular messages from an unknown world of teenage gossip and pop culture references, fitting the pieces together like a shattered mirror and filling in the jagged-edged gaps with the poet’s expansive imagination. In Navigating the Quartz Forest, Roy’s whimsical poems become a sparkling tribute from a father to his beloved daughter.

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Dinosaur Hour

Dinosaur Hour, as a collection is concerned with the violence in nature, but also how articulating violence done to or by nature provided a relief from the strongest doubts of life, presenting a fresh, 21st century ars poetica response to the Romantic view of landscape holding all truths.

Poem after poem, Roy presents imagery of a brutal (or brutalized) landscape against which humans are silent, ambivalent, and torn. His pastoral violence emerges as the most apt articulation in the speaker’s interactions with others and with his own memories, anxieties around the passage of time, and concerns about what happens after this life ends.

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Miss Manhattan

Miss Manhattan truly captures the richness of diversity and the simultaneity of life happening in New York. The text is rich, tumbling, and layered, yet never chaotic as the sensations of people, cars, birds, flowers, and all forms of city life cascading around the speaker’s (and reader’s) attention. This unique collection cleverly displays the inherent resonance of life in the city, in a beautiful, joyful, and sometimes riotous, but always with a sense of life and creative force, not destruction or entropy. These poems live in the individual body, even as they describe an external and collective experience.

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Of Moon and Washing Machine

Biman Roy’s Of Moon and Washing Machine is a lovely collection of poems fusing nature, psychological insights, and the delightful flavoring of his East Indian heritage. Some are straightforward and others more surreal, but all bring to mind an interesting and curious mind that views the world with precision and, at times, a touch of humor. An engaging read!

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