PROLIFERA VIII

EDITORIAL: A HAIBUN

Poised between December 2022 and January 2023, the year is on the verge of turning, of ringing in the new. We at EKL Review believe in Ezra Pound’s motto of “Make It New.” And so, the 8th issue brings you avant-garde poetry like never before, and six unique prose pieces which include two photo essays.

This is the season to accept and celebrate ourselves. The stellar team of EKL Review editors have been celebrating several achievements– the dynamic Nikita Parik was awarded the Charles Wallace Fellowship at the University of Stirling, Sufia Khatoon’s iconic peace poetry installation has been selected for display at Kala Ghoda Festival; our celebrity  Editor-in-chief, Amit Shankar Saha, is back from the star-studded APWT (Asia Pacific Writers and Translators) Meet and ready with his first non-fiction collection A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Essayist; the flamboyant Anindita Bose beautifully orchestrated Chair Poetry Evenings in Kolkata; and Yours Truly experienced a beautiful interlude at Pondicherry/Auroville Poetry Festival. Moreover, Sufia’s poetry collection Death in the Holy Month was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for the second time around, while Nikita Parik’s extraordinary volume, My City is a Murder of Crows, and Yours Truly’s sensual book, The Elegant Nobody, were among the 11 shortlisted titles for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2022.

As Lewis Carroll had written: “Life–what is it but a dream?” Our lives are, indeed, interludes between the great sagas of Birth and Death. And we authors choose to fill this interlude with our compositions, both poetic and prosaic, and with the music of our creativity. As the New Year dawns, I raise a toast to all those whom we love, and who love us, whose passion burns bright at the altar of the Eternal Muse.

a ship’s long voyage–

you light the moon

on crinkled pages

December, 2022