Smoked Frames is by Srijani Rupsha Mitra, a young woman with a psychology degree and an eye for the introspective. JLRB Press is a small-run imprint in Nanaimo, B.C, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation. It specializes in poetry, with a strong emphasis on queer and neurodivergent voices and emerging writers.
At 40 pages, Smoked Frames is a slim debut book of poetry written over the course of 4 years. Its sumptuous, lit-from-within language recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mitra’s eye creates loci of grace and holiness.
Mitra has a way with embodying place using apt word choices such as in “Jwalamukhi Temple:” After darshan, we sat by the milky staircase. How perfect is that adjective for white marble in a world of a twilit temple? The steps which provide respite, comfort, and nourish as people in the incense seem suspended in fluid, in unity. This quality of light is the subject: would it fill in our porous, mud-packed, thirsty bruises/ of selves. The perception feels loaded with an ecstatic dervish quality, a deep mediation, a natural high, born of worship.
“Is this how we find God, buried within us,
when our rusted despair is propelled out of frame.”
It’s that choice of words that floors me. A rusted despair conveys so much metal fatigue, age made obsolete for our old aches — an opening for renewal.
There’s a density that provokes poem envy. Witness: extravagant body, greened burst, light ecstasy. or realization creaks like sleek, slow repentance. S. Rupsha Mitra’s poetry collection of 31 poems is divided into about half along the lines of internal and external: “The Journey to Self” and “The Passage to Bhārat.” These are each marked by a beautiful intensity and control.
There’s a dextrous exciting sort of phrasing that bobs up regularly and makes for a slower read, for unpacking a meditation on truth. Will truth reach us, she asks, like a torrential river in its chaos, or as something simpler, as emancipation from wild enjambments.
These poems consider duality while calling binaries false, and thereby revealing infinite options which are more true. Nothing is so simple as truth that can almost salve. What is true may be problem salving not problem solving. There is a burgeoning lyricism regarding the womb-dweller of each hope and the swell of silence at the other end of the ghat? There’s a heady rush where the meaning is the sensuous — in the emotive range, in the exploration and not in The Answer.
How strange life is in bringing the same subjects from random directions simultaneously. At the same time as I’m reading the collection, with a poem of Amritsar, over at Itchy Boot’s Vlog, Noraly is also visiting the Golden Temple at Amritsar. Two perspectives on the same thing, in two places, in a week. For Mitra, it was possible to hold the day/ just as it blossomed: between the spot where the horizon/ met the sky and the temple rose … the arteries of sweetened air, the welkin now the colour of halwa.
Mitra’s poems about Saraswati Puja were not the expected reverential, frank with struggle, I query the integrity within and without. Returning the resolution is not a flippant caving but a wrestle towards light when feeling the weight of night.
“repetition reproduces recurring
grudges
I tell myself, fuck you.”
Mitra’s angle is her own unapologetic voice. I looked with trepidation at a suite of poems within called “Mermaid Myths, Reconstructed.” This subject I found tends to lean on tropes in other works, but I was interested to read the treatment in Mitra’s hands. It is a cross-section of myths from various regions of Asia, Africa, the UK, and medieval Europe. As with many of her visions, there’s an iridescence, a gilding, a layer of hope added that uplifts and affirms life. I look forward to seeing what she makes next.
There’s an iridescence, a gilding, a layer of hope added that uplifts and affirms life … I look forward to seeing what she makes next.
S. Rupsha Mitra is a poet from India. She is a feminist writer and an advocate for disability and mental health.
Mitra has had her poems published in a variety of magazines. Her chapbook Soul God was the finalist in a chapbook contest held by The Poetry Question. She also took part in The Poetry inPrint Residency. The imprint’s website is at jlrbpress.ca and the author’s is at: srupshapoetry.com
Publisher: JLRB Press (December 1, 2023)
Paperback 6″ x 9″ | 51 pages
ISBN: 978-1-7388-9495-6
Pearl Pirie's WriteBulb is now available at the Apple store. A prompt app for iOS 15 and up gives writing achievement badges. Pirie’s 4th poetry collection was footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021), minimalist poems, won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. Forthcoming chapbooks from Catkin Press and Turret House. Find more at www.pearlpirie.com or at patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet
