An Afternoon in My Mind

“His poetry is a pastiche of everyday articulation, news excerpts, and vainness of conflicts.”
The Statesman

“A restless wanderer.”
The Hindu

“The American philosopher Stanley Cavell once observed that ‘for a child to grow requires the familiar, for an adult to demands strangeness.’ Sonnet Mondal’s collection An Afternoon in My Mind immerses its readers in a range of startling and subtly surreal mind-states, at once familiar and strange: ‘My legs were not on the ground,’ he writes, ‘and I was not flying either.’ His poems search out his childhood–and our collective histories–to unearth the foundations, the very cradle of the Real.”
Christina Davis

 “Sonnet Mondal’s An Afternoon in My Mind is a young man’s meditation on time, filled with the recognition that it is too late to return to childhood. It is both personal and political; concerned with questions of the spirit and of matter. The plain-spoken tone of these poems is a cover for their deeper metaphysical inquiries. Narrative saturates every observation: ‘A man stands holding his bicycle / in the bus stop shed,’ Mondal writes in ‘On a Snowy Morning.’ ‘When he rides away the story will follow him.’ And though the poems investigate loss, yearning, and solitude, they do not forgo humor, as in the wry, wary ‘Another Reason to Live’: ‘Someone advised me to watch / monochromatic films and let whiskey / slip across a placid tongue to come out of this swamp.’ Mondal seems to have eschewed this advice: his tongue is not placid; it speaks with an impassioned clarity full of energetic surprise ‘inside a forest to sip some solitude / and now I am stuck in a wildfire.’”
Catherine Barnett

“Every road in Sonnet Mondal’s new collection, An Afternoon in My Mind, moves forward to the past. I use this turn of phrase advisedly, for the past is never concluded in Mondal’s poignant and haunting poems, never fully left behind. It suffuses the present as the remembered scent of first rains and muddy streams. It infiltrates the future in the voice of a vanished grandfather and the resonance of a ferry horn. ‘Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,’ as Eliot wrote, in the quantifiable real estate of a city and also in the mercurial imagination of its poets. In the remembered landscapes that Mondal explores, we come often upon the house as ruin and as nest, in autumn and in the monsoon, as architecture and as story. Every poem in this book is a house, its hospitable doors open to the consolations of recall and remembrance.”
Ranjit Hoskote

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Sonnet Mondal writes from Kolkata and is the author of Karmic Chanting (Copper Coin, 2018), Ink and Line (Dhauli Books, 2018) and five other books of poetry. He has read at literary festivals in Macedonia, Ireland, Turkey, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Hungary and Slovakia. His  writings have appeared in publications across  Europe, North America, Asia, Africa and Australia.

He has served as a guest editor for Poetry at Sangam and Words Without Borders. Founder and director of Chair Poetry Evenings: Kolkata’s International Poetry Festival, Mondal edits the Indian section of Lyrikline (Haus für Poesie, Berlin) and serves as managing editor of Verseville. His poems have been translated in over fifteen languages.