PROLIFERA XIII

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Note from the Vanguard

POETRY

PROSE

Note from the Vanguard

EDITORIAL

Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, writes, “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” Over the past four years, I have inhabited multiple houses in various cities and countries: a dormitory room in Andrew Stuart Hall at the University of Stirling; a house in Highgate, North London, which I occupied briefly; a shared living space with a friend in the Darwin Houses at the University of Kent in Canterbury; homes in the lovely cities of Al-Juffair and Budaiya in the Kingdom of Bahrain; and, at present, a house in Tagore’s Shantiniketan, where I work as an Assistant Professor of English at a private university. A city that one has breathed or walked in, or a house that one has ever woken up in, ceases to be just a house or a city in its physical, geometrical dimensions. These spaces become spaces of memory, imagination, being, and belonging. They become intimate archives of the lives we have lived and the selves we have been, even briefly, within them.

In the introduction to my Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar shortlisted poetry collection, My City is a Murder of Crows, I compare the book to the human body and mention how the first section of the collection is the heart – the heart of the city: the cities we live in, the cities we travel to, the towns we dance in and out of – physically, emotionally, through pixels on a screen, through roots and wings. So in Hyderabad, the dialect of one Uber bike rider becomes the whole entire city for me (“Cityscape”), or a Jhumka-seller in Delhi becomes the eye of the sea/…. A sea that really/ is a moon, as it/ waxes, then wanes….. Swells, then contracts,/ birthing and unbirthing/ the glaze/ of a hundred cities (“Glass Rotundity”). The city, in these poems, is not always a vast geographical entity. Sometimes, it is a single encounter. These encounters have taught me that cities are not only built through architecture, infrastructure, and history but also made through voices, gestures, glances, and the fleeting intimacies of everyday life. A city may reveal itself in a street, a room, a conversation, or a face; it may remain with us long after we have left it.

The present issue offers multitudinous ways of looking, inhabiting, imagining, and remembering the city. In Anatoly Loginov’s crisp and raw language, “the city hunches.” His poem almost smells of metal and rubber. In Zehra Naqvi’s poem, “a city’s bashful longing” is “stitched in latticed lace.” Basudhara Roy, in “Kashi,” lets her eyes “speak in darshan”—one wonders whether this is darshan as the beholding of God, or darshan as the Hindi word for philosophy. It is up to the readers to decide and interpret for themselves. These are not merely descriptions of cities; they are acts of perception, ways of making a place visible through language. The issue brings together poetry and prose from writers across the world, each offering a distinct encounter with urban space. The city emerges here as a site of movement and stillness, intimacy and estrangement, memory and invention. It is a place we inhabit, but also a place that inhabits us.

To end with Bachelard:

“Nous ne sommes jamais de vrais historiens, mais toujours près des poètes, et notre emotion n’est peut-être qu’une expression d’une poésie perdue.”
(We are never quite historians, but always close to poets; and perhaps our emotion is nothing more than an expression of a lost poetry).

I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I have enjoyed bringing it together.

Nikita Parik

Editor, EKL Review

September, 2026

POETRY

Alex Carrigan

Ice Wall

Anatoly Loginov

Body

Aardhra Chandran

Blue Rexine

Basudhara Roy