‘unripe fruit at the window’ is a full-length book of poems and artworks (a Red River Publication) by Rupam Baoni.
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.
In this brilliantly sensory collection, Rupam Baoni strikes fire and light. These are visceral bodily poems, ripe with colour, bright with love.
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.
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.
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