Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen

“This is a collection of love and longing—for homes left behind, for homes alive in the mind, for places that the reader dwells in through each poem. Vivid, elegant, reverent and elegiac, Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen skillfully takes us on a journey through multiple moods and geographies. By the end of it, we are left with a joyous raga resounding in our ears and the taste of hilsa fish with mustard oil on our tongues that lingers.”
Shikha Malaviya, author of Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems 

“Reading Bhaswati Ghosh’s poems I found myself enacting the premise of her title Nostalgic For a Place Never Seen, longing for the sights, sounds and smells Ghosh conjures. Right from her opening lines with their clever play on the word ‘plot’, there is a conflation of poetic space and physical place whose geometries converge in the last line of the poem: ‘The plot is home’. From a landscape of lost ancestral homelands evocatively populated by her “grandma [who] smuggled a river / in her eyelids’, Ghosh spans the globe. This book alchemizes memory, turning it into that mysterious feeling the Portuguese call ‘saudade’, an emotion you will want to imbibe again and again.”
Sophia Naz, author of Bark Archipelago 

“Bhaswati takes us to her own places, people, and events of life. Punctuated by stunning images, mesmerizing metaphors and many shades of experience, they all become our own places. Each poem, with its deeply entrenched story, makes us return to our own moments that blend the past and the present. Reading poem after poem, episodes unfold as slices of life transport us to our own home, as an insider and outsider at once.”
Afsar Mohammad, author of Evenings with Sufi 

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Bhaswati Ghosh writes and translates fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Victory Colony, 1950 is her first book of fiction. Her first work of translation from Bengali into English is My Days with Ramkinkar Baij. Bhaswati’s writing has appeared in several literary journals. Nostalgic for a Place Never Seen is her first poetry collection. She lives in Ontario, Canada.