Uncut Poetry Salon featuring Soul Poets Kashiana & Indran

You have to hear Kashiana speak about the sensuousness of bitter gourd curry or the Zen of belonging,  to understand the delicate relationship she has with words and how she captures the fragility of beauty. As a counterpoint we have Indran, with his muscular poetry which combines indignation, despair and angst into a poetic tapestry of aching pulchritude. 

 

Both Kashiana and Indran are terrific poets based out of USA, and came together for a lovely chat with Uncut Poetry on their new poetry books. They spoke about the genesis of their poetic journeys, of memory, of displacement, of processes, and why diaspora poets possibly have a more universal view of the countries they settle in.

 

Kashiana Singh is from India, lives in North Carolina and embodies her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her everyday. She is a management professional by definition but a poet practitioner by personal preference. She proudly serves as Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News. Her poems can be found on Rattle, Poets Reading the News, Oddball Magazine, Café Dissensus, amongst others. Kashiana says that she carries all her geographical homes within her poetry.

 

Her first two books were Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words and Crushed Anthills. Woman by the Door is her latest collection of poetry.

 

Poet Usha Akella says this of her book - "Singh’s poetry universe is one of hidden corners, apertures of light, and the liminality of experience verbing into memory. A poetry replete with metaphors of passageways and openings, personal myth making is alchemized from the pixels of memories to define what it is to be woman in this world."

 

Get Woman by the Door here - https://linktr.ee/kashianasingh

 

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant. Also recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun (Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube. He also publishes poetry under the name Beltway Editions(www.beltwayeditions.com) and their first published book is "Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air", which is an anthology of poems by six Muslim women poets who wrote together at M.I.T.

 

Get Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant here - https://www.broadstonebooks.com

 

If you liked this interview, consider listening to these wonderful poets speaking about their poetry, life and times -

• Poetry Busker Ryan Tomlin
• African American Poet Katerina Canyon

 

Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com

Subscribe to my newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com

 

The details of the music used in this episode are as follows -

Rustic Ballad by Alexander Nakarada
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4720-rustic-ballad
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license