‘The private and the public, the local and the global, the mythical and the modern meet to create the restrained but memorable music of the poems in this collection. A significant addition to Indian poetry in English!’— Tabish Khair
In Manu Dash’s world, a cyclone is a lucrative industry, a childhood lie becomes a lesson in the workings of the State, and a simple question—why do we not live in peace?—persists.
Recipes for Cooking Rainbows brings Dash’s sharp, often irreverent gaze to bear on the contradictions of contemporary life. Moving from the villages and storm-battered coast of Odisha to the restless streets of Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Puri, these poems confront political deceit, the cruelties of war, ecological destruction and the absurdities of everyday existence. But there are quieter preoccupations too: a mother’s defiant laughter, the loss of a father, the passage of time, the consolations of memory and the uncertain possibilities of language.
Playful and unsettling by turns, moving between satire and elegy, myth and the everyday, these poems are alive to both the ridiculousness and the sorrow of being human. In a world increasingly given over to anger, fear and disorder, Dash searches for an unlikely recipe for survival: courage, compassion, laughter and, perhaps, a little peace.
