unripe fruit at the window – COMING SOON!

Rupam Baoni, Unripe Fruit at the Window

‘unripe fruit at the window’ is a full-length book of poems and artworks (a Red River Publication) by Rupam Baoni.

This collection is a crucible of language forged by a poet intimately at home in her medium, melding the geographical and botanical, arcane literary and medical, brewing its own lexicon and over layering meaning in generous libations until the reader is soaked in its spells. Swirling with the fierce wonder of love, loss, desire, and bewilderment, it is a meditation on how we remain alive to the world, to the flooding brightness and darkness of being. unripe fruit at the window pulses with the muddily divine. Through the texture of bodily pleasure and pain we are touched by a clear core of familiar humanity. In sounding out the lush phrases of this collection, the reader feels profoundly heard – their heart, in its fullness and breaks, is seen and given voice. These poems, impressive in their range and sweep, take in vast landscapes, moments of simple reflection and ecstatic pleasure. From the violence and fierce wonder of the everyday, they are a meditation on what it is to remain alive to the world; to the unbearable brightness and darkness of being.

Emily Mercer
Editor and Literary Critic

praise for ‘unripe fruit at the window’

Language, in Baoni’s deft hands, turns to liquid – blood, tears, rivers – and flows between contradictions – “the lulls between” – of knowing and unknowing, homing and unhoming, growing and dying. This corpus of poems, bursting with cacophonous colour and splendour, are full of flesh, breath and bones; they demand to be read with your entire body. I grieved with Baoni, and basked, too, in the glory of a life lived and loved.
Sana Goyal

Editor of Wasafiri and Book Critic

In this brilliantly sensory collection, Rupam Baoni strikes fire and light. These are visceral bodily poems, ripe with colour, bright with love.
Katrina Naomi

Poet and Translator

Rupam Baoni’s poems are explorations of intensely felt love and loss, united by a profoundly embodied reimagining of the self. This may be as river, tree, or ecosystem, but also – startlingly – as bone or as its own detachable body parts. It is as if she speaks from deep inside a process of metamorphosis.
Jane Griffiths

Poet and Critic

Rupam Baoni gets down to the bone of the matter, straight away: the matter that is life, love and loss. Water turns to light, light to colour and colour to pain and renaissance. Her poetry appears in an osmotic drama with her sketches. Her words tell histories and geographies like rosary beads. These are words that had died in silence and slow deafness, now reborn as expression. Hearken.
Debashish Lahiri

Poet and Editor

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