# Into the Migrant City

- Link: https://writersworkshopindia.com/2015/07/19/into-the-migrant-city/
- Published: 2015-07-19T18:43:45+00:00
- Author: admin

5/5 - (1 vote)

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**Author:** Nabina Das
 **Pages:** 104 **Year of Publication:** 2013 **Price:** 
Rs 200 **ISBN:** 978-93-5045-057-4 (9789350450574)

_**About the Author**_
 Nabina Das holds an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University(
USA) and an MA in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her first
novel, _Footprints in the Bajra_ (Cedar Books, New Delhi) was longlisted for the
Vodafone Crossword Book Award, 2011. Her first collection of poetry, _Blue Vessel_(
Zaporogue Press, Denmark) was published in 2012. She has been the recipient of several
writing fellowships including the Charles Wallace Fellowship in Creative Writing(
at the University of Stirling, UK) and the Sangam House Lavanya Sankaran Fiction
Fellowship – both in 2012. Das has won prizes in major Indian poetry contests such
as the 2009 Prakriti Foundation Open Contest and the 2008 Open Space-HarperCollins
Poetry Contest. She writes for the _Prairie Schooner_, a literary journal brought
out by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA, and is on the peer review committee
of _The Four Quarters Magazine_, a literary journal published from Assam.

Outside of poetry, Das has trained in Indian classical music and has performed in
radio and TV programmes as well as street theatre. She is also a blogger; you can
visit her blog
 [here](http://nabinadas13.wordpress.com/).

_**Teaser**_

_Redness_

The summer storm bloomed on an eastern sky
 the west looked red roses of anger heaped
on a bush stuck in its thorns smarting faces, hatred.

You were watching _Caché_ on the living-room TV
 blood squirting from slashed-up
necks headless chickens scattered in an ungainly race backwards, forward, again 
back.

My finger touched a tomato skin shedding light
 of a red ink, darklike – wasn’t 
this what my father’s revolutionary friends brought in, a newspaper wrapped tight

So not everyone would know how words tumble
 red and angry on our roads? I thought
I saw a word flutter open again, a hue, not a name or mundane thing like odes.

You thought we’d lost our tongues, our attitude
 piled under the redness of shame
peripheral to storms, deaths, news of constant ruse and I realized, a colour doesn’t
need a name.

_**Contents**_
 55 poems spread across three sections