Böcker av Sumana Roy

An enchanting and joyous exploration of life and creativity at the geographical edges of the modern world

In this remarkable and often unsettling book, Sumana Roy gives us a new vision of what it means to be human in the natural world. Increasingly disturbed by the violence, hate, insincerity, greed and selfishness of her kind, the author is drawn to the idea of becoming a tree. 'I was tired of speed', she writes, 'I wanted to live to tree time.' Besides wanting to emulate the spacious, relaxed rhythm of trees, she is drawn to their non-violent ways of being, how they tread lightly upon the earth, their ability to cope with loneliness and pain, the unselfishness with which they give freely of themselves and much more. She gives us new readings of the works of writers, painters, photographers and poets (Rabindranath Tagore and D. H. Lawrence among them) to show how trees and plants have always fascinated us. She studies the work of remarkable scientists like Jagadish Chandra Bose and key spiritual figures like the Buddha to gain even deeper insights into the world of trees. She writes of those who have wondered what it would be like to have sex with a tree, looks into why people marry trees, explores the death and rebirth of trees and tells us why a tree was thought by forest-dwellers to be equal to ten sons.Mixing memoir, literary history, nature studies, spiritual philosophies and botanical research, How I Became a Tree is a book that will prompt readers to think of themselves and the natural world that they are an intrinsic part of, in fresh ways. It is that rarest of things - A truly original work of art.

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'Sumana Roy is one of the most original writers in Indian English today, whose writing easily slides out of the clutches of genres.'-The Indian Express '"Every relationship is a long-distance relationship," we read in one of Sumana Roy's intriguing new poems. Out of Syllabus brilliantly anatomizes those relationships, viewing them from every disciplinary perspective: chemistry, physics, biology, geography, history, botany-and finally art. The result is a dazzling dissection of love, longing, and loss in all their conflicting moods and moments. Roy's images and metaphors are as enigmatic as they are precise. However private and personal her subjects, Roy maintains an aesthetic distance, wit and verbal control that recalls Sylvia Plath-but a Plath less angry, wiser-even philosophical. This is a very special book-one that deserves a wide readership.' -Marjorie Perloff, Emeritus Professor, Stanford University 'Sumana Roy's wonderful book of poems, Out of Syllabus, combines rational ordering with the "unreason" of striking figures of speech. The rational ordering lies in the naming of sections as items in a comprehensive syllabus: "History", "Chemistry", "Physics" and so on. The striking figures of speech are everywhere in these poems. They give "out" in the book's title a negative as well as a positive meaning. These metaphors are often coupled to what they figure by way of a key word in Out of Syllabus: "is." But you must read these powerful and challenging poems for yourself, dear reader, to get a feeling for what they are like and for what they mean as unique poetic experiences.' -J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, University of California at Irvine