Cover Art by Catherine Fontenot
“A heron in the rain—rather, for every flap toward a steeple to rest a beak and listen to thunderous songs of the Gulf.”
Description: In Shome Dasgupta’s latest poetry collection, generational threads weave rich Acadian and East Indian tapestries. Crossing cultures and continents, Cajun South Brown Folk sings across “espresso sunrises” and the “kindred of skin” shared beneath them. Dripping with memory and steeped in history and place, these formally diverse poems take heart in the strength that builds through a multitude of tongues and homes still ever rooted in the search for light and love through connections between Bengali and Cajun ways of life.
"In Cajun South Brown Folk, Shome Dasgupta's well-crafted poems traverse East Indian culture via Louisiana’s Lafayette Cajun home base. These poems tell stories in Louisiana English interspersed with Bengali, or its endonym Bangla, a classical Indo-Aryan language from the Indo-European language family native to the West Bengal of India. Readers are at once transported from Cajun Lafayette life to Indian family ties, and the two cultures kiss us warmly in memorable verse. From a 'Cajun espresso sunrise' and crawfish seasons of Acadiana to khichuri, or rice and beans of Indian cuisine, thank you Shome Dasgupta, for this unique gift."
—Mona Lisa Saloy, author of Black Creole Chronicles, and Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2021-2023
"When you read Shome Dasgupta's Cajun South Brown Folk, it feels like you’re watching two movies simultaneously, one recorded over the other but failing to erase the original in its entirety. Through Dasgupta’s 'cut and splice,' we are lulled into a cinematic game of comparison, one in which we are prompted to find the similarities between two places by sifting through their differences. We jump from Kolkata to Acadiana, from a Bengali kitchen to a Cajun one, from the speaker’s mother’s wrists to his own, and through these leaps we begin to see a cultural common denominator of deep love, both familial and communal. These are poems that know something about tenderness, that know that love is in the field, the kitchen, the food, the hand."
—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
From the collection:
Abecedarian For The Sacred Roux
Allons. Grazing bald cypress bark with open palms,
bayou bends and whirring airboats full of swamp:
Cajun mornings sprinkled with mallard sunshine beaks,
Dimanche dirt prayers—andouille pews carved from fallen
elms and glass stained with sacred roux, debris and silt
filter through our pores, letting us suck in sediments.
Gumbo burnt deltas remind us of Ganges ancestry, a
habitation where me and bhai dip our pining fingers
into the throats of our late relatives: their watery eyes
journey along the river, telling us stories about their
Kolkatan genealogy. Mythological—like rougarou tongues,
lore of folk and tale, turtle shell conchs chiming games of
mère may I: dozing gators along the banks snore and bell.
Nous—nous, we walk to Gariahat in search of onions and
okra to build castles in the kitchen with Ma and Baba. Back:
papillon pecans cocooned and covered—moon stringed moss.
Qu'est-ce que c'est? C’est tout. Amra—me and older bhai
ride a pirogue and paddle toward a star singing our names:
siffler—ragas and talas, hypnotized from mosquito hums.
Tabla beats drum our ears from centuries ago—Dagi’s
urn, a cremation to remember a kiss on the forehead:
vas, meandering amid accordion notes, floating up and up,
we fill our chests with past monsoons and marigolds, and
xylophones ring and dance from dawn’s distance where les
yeaux of twilight melodies envelope like fog and mist and
zydeco clefs hover in our stomachs—a fifolet on the horizon.
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