Böcker av Biman Roy

Each dreamlike lyric in Biman Roy's Navigating the Quartz Forest is charmingly paired with a small handwritten note hastily jotted down on blue-lined notebook paper-artifacts from his daughter's life outside the family home. "All through the evening, we keep talking nonessentials, / tiptoeing around secret tulips," he says. These notes, like scraps of overheard conversations removed from their natural habitats, become the crystalline seeds of new poems. Side-by-side with each other, the poems act as translator for these somewhat oracular messages from an unknown world of teenage gossip and pop culture references, fitting the pieces together like a shattered mirror and filling in the jagged-edged gaps with the poet's expansive imagination. In Navigating the Quartz Forest, Roy's whimsical poems become a sparkling tribute from a father to his beloved daughter.

Dinosaur Hour, as a collection is concerned with the violence in nature, but also how articulating violence done to or by nature provided a relief from the strongest doubts of life, presenting a fresh, 21st century ars poetica response to the Romantic view of landscape holding all truths.Poem after poem, Roy presents imagery of a brutal (or brutalized) landscape against which humans are silent, ambivalent, and torn. His pastoral violence emerges as the most apt articulation in the speaker's interactions with others and with his own memories, anxieties around the passage of time, and concerns about what happens after this life ends.