Hunger and Predation

Judges' comments

A fierce, vivid collection blending the bruised glory of suburbia, conversations with gods of Indian mythology, and a deeply poignant interrogation of body and cultural dysphoria. Hunger and Predation traverses worlds — real, imagined and hoped for — discovering a pulsing, bodily wildness which escapes the constraints of conventional identity and category. Beautifully wrought suburban scenes emerge like long-exposure photos, detail and image merging and blending until the poet works observation and interiority into a ‘conglomeration of our silenced words, our terrors, our hopes’. In a series of poems which converse with gods, Pooja Mittal Biswas discovers ways to question and reshape the binaries and dehumanising simplicities thrust upon individuals by the societies they inhabit. This collection is deeply honest, using the confessional mode as a way to weave together the bodily and otherworldly, creating a dialogue between identity, culture and history; in doing so Biswas stretches the limitations of the confessional form, using it to question and reveal the ‘cartography of the mind’.

Central to this collection is the idea of the fugue, both as a contrapuntal composition blending multiple melodies, and as a state in which one’s sense of identity is disrupted. The language is elevated and musical; concentrated images and precise lineation work together to allow fragments to chime off each other in search of new and better patterns of meaning. Through masterful formal choices and exquisite diction, Biswas achieves a recognition of the multiplicitous, indefinable strands of self and creates a space in which identity in all its queer, cultural, historical and bodily forms is able to exist.